So you’ve got an idea for software or a product that’s so easy, so beneficial, that it’s for everyone: the general public. Well, you’re wrong.

[tweetmeme]Ok, that’s a little harsh. But we find it’s often over-optimism. Other times it’s beneficence: we’ve had several projects where the goal is to release information freely to the world for the greater good, reaching as many people as we can. The Encyclopedia of Life is one example (see our first post about it). In either case there’s a real danger that if you think you’re making something for everyone, you might end up appealing to no one. People have such very different needs (even from the same information) that you can’t serve all of them.

There are at least two ways to go wrong:

1. Just design with the features that naturally seem needed. After all, ‘everyone’ includes you. This is the more common error. Here’s the problem in an example:

Due to differences in age and digital literacy, my grandmother and my cousin have only one single electronic device they both use every day (any guesses?). She’ll only use something if you’ve taken great care to design it for her, and he’ll drop it as soon as it’s missing something he wants. There’s a big difference between designing a smart phone for him and a Jitterbug phone built with hardware and services targeted at seniors for her. There are lots of other factors: disposable income, communication habits, media consumption, nationality and culture, internet connectivity, and many more. It’s important to know which ones matter for your idea.

2. Try to accommodate everyone under the sun: grandmothers, toddlers, and your neighbor’s dog. Support every type of user’s key tasks by adding buttons or deepening navigation and soon everyone has a harder time finding and using what they need. The opportunity to make a great experience for some gets diluted into a mediocre experience for all and, despite your intentions, that might mean no one uses it. Does my digital picture frame really need to support on board photo editing? And printing? Play MP3s? Read RSS and show sports scores? When using it, it might be complex to simply avoid what you don’t need.

So you want broad appeal and good design. How can you start identifying your users?

As a warm-up, think of some well-known groups or use the ones others have identified, like tweens or business travelers. We’ve done brainstorming sessions where we randomly pair a particular segment of people with particular capabilities. You might find some groups yield more ideas than others.

Next, are you building on an existing product? Talk to the product team. If that’s you, think about the usage and feedback data you could gather. Or maybe there’s something else out there that has some similar qualities. See if you can learn about the people using it, and especially how and why. A lot of times you might be surprised. Twitter’s creators were surprised when the service was used by news, emergency response organizations, and politicians. The film industry once tried to kill VCRs but in the end they were largely used for purchased and rented content, which was a huge boon for them. Look carefully and you might find an unmet need that could be an opportunity.

Now think of the qualities of your idea that clearly distinguish it from others. Do any of these qualities seem aligned to particular groups you can identify? For example, if your offering is a new communication tool, you might think of teens, who are notorious communicators in multiple modalities.

Go out and test your theories. If you’re right you can look at their tasks and needs to start getting a vision of the product.

I’m not suggesting that you need to focus on only one specific group to get a good result. But the more you focus on a coherent target, the better chance you have of attracting and exciting them. If you nail it, they’re likely to bring other groups with them.