Extreme Users

Designers engage with people to understand their needs and gain insights about their lives. They also draw inspiration from their workarounds and frameworks, as they are more notable. Looking at extreme users will therefore often lead to surprising, inspirational, and actionable insights that help you to pull out meaningful needs that may not emerge when engaging with the middle of the bell curve. However, these needs are often also needs of the wider population.

To identify your extreme users, you can look at your challenge through different lenses, for example:

• Demographics (age, gender or ethnicity)
• Behaviors (experts vs. newbies or out of the ordinary)
• Attitude toward tech (early adopter vs laggard)

By looking through those lenses, you can stretch the edges of it to imagine and identify specific groups of people. Those are your extreme users.