Every project we work on, whether it’s for a commercial organisation or an academic research programme, eventually comes down to the same uncomfortable question.

Who is this actually for?

It sounds obvious, yet it is remarkable how often the people designing a website, platform, or service are not the same people who will eventually use it.

In the academic world, particularly across NIHR funded research programmes, there is a well established discipline for addressing this. It’s called Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE). The principle is refreshingly simple. If your research is designed to improve people’s lives, involve those people in shaping it. Not as a final sense check, but right from the beginning.

 

The Value of Lived Experience

One of the most rewarding parts of working on NIHR projects is seeing this process in action. A room full of experienced researchers can spend months designing what appears to be the perfect study, only for a public contributor to ask a question that completely changes the discussion.

Sometimes it is incredibly insightful. Occasionally it is wonderfully unrealistic. But almost always it brings something into the room that expertise alone could not. Lived experience.

It changes the questions being asked and it changes priorities. More importantly, it often highlights assumptions nobody realised they were making.

 

The Same Problem Exists in Business

Commercial organisations rarely use the term PPIE. Most have never heard of it. Yet they face exactly the same challenge.

Business owners usually know their customers extremely well. They know the sectors they work in. They understand pricing, competitors and market conditions, and they know roughly what keeps customers awake at night.

What they often don’t know is what actually happens once someone lands on their website. Where do they hesitate? Which page answers their question, and which one creates more? Which content never gets read, and where do they leave?

There is often a surprising gap between who we think our users are and how they actually behave. That gap is where many digital projects quietly lose their effectiveness.

 

Why Assumptions Are Dangerous

One of the biggest misconceptions in digital projects is believing that experience automatically equals understanding. It doesn’t. A business may have served customers successfully for twenty years, yet that doesn’t necessarily mean those customers interact with a website in the way the business expects.

People skim. They scan. They ignore carefully written paragraphs. They click the button you never expected them to click, or they never find the button you thought was obvious.

None of this is because users are wrong. It is because they are human.

 

Discovery Is More Than Gathering Requirements

This is why we place so much emphasis on discovery workshops. Many people think discovery is simply gathering a list of requirements. It isn’t.

Good discovery is about understanding people. What are they trying to achieve? What information do they need? What worries them? What would success look like from their perspective?

Only then does it become sensible to discuss layouts, navigation, functionality or technology. Too many projects start with design. The better ones start with questions.

 

The Government Has Recognised This Too

This thinking is not unique to research. The Government Service Standard places enormous emphasis on understanding users before designing services. Services should be built around genuine user needs, not organisational assumptions.

That principle applies just as well to a university research platform as it does to a manufacturer, law firm or engineering business. The technology may change. People rarely do.

 

Slower at the Beginning. Better at the End.

Involving users early often feels slower. Workshops take time, user interviews require planning, and feedback sometimes challenges assumptions that felt completely logical.

But making changes at the beginning of a project is far easier than rebuilding something after launch because nobody questioned the original assumptions.

Good digital projects are rarely about producing the most attractive website. They are about producing something that works.

 

A Simple Question Worth Asking

Before beginning your next website, software platform or digital project, ask yourself one simple question.

Who is this really for?

If the answer comes entirely from inside your own organisation, there may still be an important voice missing. Because the best research, the best digital services, and the best websites all share one quiet truth.

They were never really about you.