Understanding people in design means developing awareness of the messy nature of human actions and emotions. The ability to observe, analyse and synthesise information about how people behave and what they think is central to design activity. Understanding people has various dimensions and associated methods. For example we can aim to understand what motivates people to act in a certain way. The ethnographic methods to do this familiar from anthropology include observation, participant observation, interviewing, and the analysis of visual material in photographic or video form. In UX it is often suggested that people are the experts about their own experience and we should prioritise subjective accounts. The ability to generalise either statistically, or more commonly theoretically, is an important way to inform design work. Understanding people in UX is not limited to observation and there is a long history of understanding people by involving them directly in the design process by making things.

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