When to Design for Emergence — Kasey Klimes

In order to meet long-tail user needs in a market context, designers must move beyond user-centered design and instead design for emergence.

For years, I’ve heard some variation of the following lament from clients, collaborators, and friends with startups: “There’s so many use cases we could solve for, but every user we talk to wants something different, and we just don’t know which ones to focus on.” or, “We’ve designed for all the common and important user needs and now we’ve hit a ceiling. How do we grow without bloating our product with minor features?” Both statements describe what we can call the long-tail problem. It’s very common—I’ve seen the long-tail problem at tiny two-person startups and at Big Tech corporations…

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• rika goldberg

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