Yesterday I read an ABC News article about Australian attitudes toward Elon Musk. That wasn’t what caught my attention though.
The poll data showed that 16% of respondents had never heard of Bill Gates, and 20% had never heard of Jeff Bezos.
Seriously? Having worked in IT and digital for over 30 years, this floored me. These are household names in my professional world. Apparently not for a significant portion of the Australian population. Who are these people?! 🤔
Assumptions are dangerous
This is why I spend so much time on requirements gathering that feels excessive to clients. “Can’t you just build it? We’ve told you what we need.”
Except what people say they need and what they actually need are often different things. And what I think they need based on my experience is frequently wrong too.
I’ve seen expensive technology implementations fail because the project team assumed users understood concepts like “the cloud” or “integration” or “data migration.” They didn’t. The training materials were incomprehensible. The system sat unused.
I’ve watched website redesigns launch without anyone testing whether the target audience could actually navigate them. The designers assumed everyone browsed websites the way they did. They don’t.
What Design Thinking actually teaches
My MBA in Design Thinking (RMIT, 2024) reinforced what the best technology professionals I’ve worked with already knew: challenge your assumptions by talking to actual users.
Observe how people actually work, what they struggle with, what they already know and what they don’t – surveys and focus groups won’t always tell you this.
When we built the accessible advocacy platform for The Future Is Accessible, we tested it with visually-impaired users navigating with screen readers during development, before launch. What seemed intuitive to sighted developers wasn’t always accessible, and we found issues we never would have discovered through our own assumptions.
The 16% who haven’t heard of Bill Gates
Those poll respondents aren’t ignorant. They’re just not in tech. They have expertise in areas where I’d be the one with no idea what’s happening.
This is why assumption is the enemy of good technology implementation. Just because I know something doesn’t mean my client does. Just because something seems obvious to me doesn’t make it obvious to the people who’ll use what I build.
Talk to users. Watch how they actually work. Ask what they already know before you start explaining – otherwise you’re building expensive solutions to problems that don’t exist, while the actual problems go unsolved.
