Stop Designing for the Average User

In the late 1940s, the United States Air Force stumbled upon a serious problem as pilots struggled to control the new, faster jet-powered planes. At worst, these planes crashed 17 times in a single day.¹ The culprit? The cockpits were designed to fit the physical dimensions of the average male pilot. When researchers measured over 4,000 pilots to update the cockpit design, not a single one fell within the average measurement range. A design meant to fit everyone ended up fitting no one.

The Air Force’s fix was to create an adjustable system, where each pilot could tailor cockpit components to their individual dimensions. Several decades later, UX designers are embracing a similar shift in philosophy. Just as no “average” cockpit fits every pilot perfectly, no digital product works the same for everyone. You wouldn’t design a shirt for the average body and expect it to fit everyone. Why, then, do we create digital products for the “average user?”

This is far from a revelation, as Don Norman, the Father of User Experience (UX), writes in The Design of Everyday Things that there is no such thing as the average person.² And he couldn’t be more right. People have fundamentally different goals, preferences, abilities, and needs. Ironically, the concept of the typical user—which attempts to corral all these human differences into one neat little bubble—removes the human element from design. In an attempt to simplify complex human traits into something understandable, we fail to capture the true diversity of real, everyday users.

Instead of creating rigid products that fit the narrow ideal of the hypothetical middle, what if we started designing digital tools to fit the unique behavioral dimensions of individual users? This article explores how designing for real behavioral clusters can boost engagement, improve inclusive design, and reveal transformative solutions to address unmet user needs.