Travelling With The User

In April 2017, a friend invited me to speak at the Bulgarian Web Summit in Sofia. The audience was mostly developers, designers, and engineers. I am a marketing and strategy person. The obvious move would have been to give a marketing talk to a technical crowd and watch them slowly disengage.

Instead I tried to talk about something we all shared — the experience of building things that are supposed to reach people, and the surprisingly consistent ways those things fail to do so.

The talk was called "Travelling With The User." I published ten follow-up posts afterward. They were too short, too fragmented, and too disconnected from each other to do the argument justice. This is the version I should have written then.

The premise starts with a train station.

Just before Christmas 2012, I was at Innsbruck Central Station trying to find my platform. The only information panel in the main hall had three people standing in front of it, and I could not see it — and I am tall. The panel was beautifully integrated into the station's architecture. It was the wrong size, placed at the wrong height, with the wrong hierarchy of information. The architects had solved an aesthetic problem and created a functional one.

This is a content problem. The shape of the information — its size, its placement, its visual weight — was designed around the space rather than around the person who needed to read it. The result was a vessel that could not deliver its contents.

Every piece of communication has a shape. That shape needs to serve the person receiving it, not the person creating it. When those two things are in conflict — and they are in conflict more often than most teams realise — the person receiving it loses every time.

The shape problem runs deeper than layout or format. It reaches into the words themselves.

Every audience has its own vocabulary — its own taxonomy of terms, references, and concepts that signals whether the person speaking belongs to the conversation. Use the wrong words and you create friction before the idea has a chance to land. The user does not consciously notice. They simply feel that something is slightly off, that this was not written for them.

I have sat in too many briefings where the internal language of a company — its product names, its internal category labels, its shorthand — was transplanted directly into external communications. The team could read it fluently. The target audience encountered it as a foreign language.

Getting the taxonomy right requires listening before speaking. Read what your audience writes. Notice the specific terms they use for their problems. Use those terms, not yours.

Once you have the right shape and the right words, the next question is harder: have you actually said anything?

I think about this through three filters — brevity, point, and relevance — and I apply them in that order because the temptation to skip the hardest one is real.

Brevity is the easiest to accept in principle and the hardest to practise. The instinct to add more — more context, more proof, more hedging — usually serves the writer, not the reader. Cut until it hurts slightly. Then cut a little more. What remains is almost always stronger.

But brevity without point is just short noise. The discipline of finding the point — the single thing you want the person to take away, stated in one sentence — is the discipline of actually knowing what you are trying to say. If you cannot write that sentence, you are not ready to write the piece.

Relevance is the filter most teams skip entirely. Why does this matter to this specific person at this specific moment? Not "why does it matter to our target audience" in the abstract — why does it matter to this person, right now? If you cannot answer that, do not send it. Irrelevant communication, however well-crafted, is just noise with better production values.

Assume you have found the right shape, the right words, and something genuinely worth saying. You still have to choose where to say it and when.

The medium is not neutral. LinkedIn carries an expectation of professional relevance and earned insight. Email asks for attention that someone is willing to give when they have time. SMS implies urgency. A long-form piece signals that what follows is worth real engagement. Each channel sets a contract with the reader before they read a single word — and content that violates that contract loses the reader before it starts.

But even choosing the right channel is not enough if you have not thought about the environment in which it will be received. Where is this person when they encounter this? On a commute, reading on a phone with one thumb? At a desk, half-distracted, with seventeen other tabs open? At home in the evening with real attention available?

The same content performs completely differently in different environments. A long essay that would reward careful reading on a Sunday afternoon will be abandoned in thirty seconds on a Tuesday morning. The content has not changed. The context has changed everything.

None of this happens in isolation. Your user did not arrive from nowhere, and they will not disappear after this single interaction.

They have encountered your product, your brand, or your communication before — and they will again. The experience they carry is the sum of all those touchpoints, including the gaps between them.

Gaps are where trust erodes. A company that sounds warm and human in its marketing emails but cold and transactional in its support responses creates a dissonance that users feel even if they cannot name it. A product that is beautifully designed on the surface but confusing at the moments that matter — checkout, onboarding, error states — trains its users to be wary of it.

Map the journey. Find the gaps. The experience you design at the seams matters as much as the experience you design at the centre.

All of this becomes significantly harder when you are building for more than one culture.

North Europeans tend to prefer communication that is direct and sparse. Far East Asian audiences often read white space as incompleteness — they expect density. Colour carries completely different signals: red is a warning in the West and a celebration in China. The direction text runs, the relationship between image and word, the implicit hierarchy of information — these shift across cultures in ways that are easy to underestimate and expensive to ignore.

I have worked on global products where cultural adaptation was treated as a nice-to-have — cut at the first scope reduction, deemed unsuitable for the budget. It was always a mistake. You cannot build bridges between audiences if you have only studied one side.

Build it right, and then build it to grow.

There is no such thing as a finished digital product. This was the first thing my professor at IE Business School, Eric Reiss, taught in the Usability and Design course: there is no perfect website. There is always something you can fix. The product starts living its own life the moment it goes live — things will be changed, issues will surface, the audience will evolve.

Scalability means thinking a few steps ahead. Build things in a way that leaves room for what comes next. The best work is not the work that satisfies the brief. It is the work the brief can grow from.

Underneath all of this is a practice that has become a buzzword precisely because it matters: empathy.

The practical version of empathy is not a feeling. It is a discipline — researching your users before you design for them, watching how they actually use what you have built rather than how you imagined they would, asking before every decision: who is this for, what are they trying to do, and what do they need from me right now to do it?

The answers to those questions are what separate communication that lands from communication that does not. All the craft in the world — the right shape, the right words, the right channel, the right timing — is in service of that fundamental act of understanding.

I closed the 2017 talk with ethics, and at the time it felt slightly abstract. It does not feel abstract anymore.

We design the systems through which people understand the world. Those systems can be honest or manipulative. They can respect attention and data or exploit them. Every design decision is also an ethical decision, made at scale, affecting real people.

Dan Klyn said at the IA Summit that year: the point of making complexity clear is not clarity — it is truth. The point is that the person on the other side has an accurate picture of reality, not a managed one.

People stopped noticing banner ads, then installed ad blockers, and are now increasingly sceptical of every digital interaction — because too many interactions have been designed against their interests rather than for them. The erosion of trust is the accumulated weight of countless small decisions that prioritised the sender over the receiver.

Design for the truth. Design for the person on the other side. Build things that work in their interest, in their context, on their terms.

Ten ideas from a 45-minute talk in Sofia.

They are not a list — they are a single argument viewed from ten angles. Shape and empathy depend on each other. Taxonomy and culture are the same problem at different scales. Brevity without point is just shorter noise. Scalability without ethics is just faster growth in the wrong direction.

The through line is the title: travel with the user. Design for the person receiving, not the person sending. Build for the context your user is actually in, not the ideal context you imagine for them.

That principle was true in 2017. It is more consequential now, because the systems we build are larger, faster, and more pervasive than anything that existed when I stood in front of 400 people in Sofia and tried to explain why an information panel in Innsbruck had taught me something important about communication.

If you are thinking about how these principles apply to social media specifically, Social Media Is A Journey, Not A Destination picks up where this piece leaves off.

Borislav Kiprin is a growth consultant for B2B SaaS and AI companies. Book a call or see how I work.