What Do You Do With a Tail Like This?

Is the reason that my Samsung phone has such a limited name field size and my Nokia such a generous one because Korean family names are so much shorter than Finnish ones?

Before you attack me for some kind of national bias for or against anyone, let me explain that this isn’t meant as a national or cultural generalization, but rather as a possible example of how we (in our role as designers) see things: through both our own eyes and our own experiences.

We may use personas in our work (or not) to help force us to see things, to approach them as others do. But it’s really difficult to experience things as others do, experience being a result of actions, environment, and expectation. That’s one reason that larger companies will have test users put devices through their paces before release; use in “the wild” is not the same as use in the lab, or while being asked to perform a scripted set of actions.

We are only just getting to a level of sophistication and stability on our core hardware and software platforms that the value of non-mass market optimization (”the Long Tail“) can be realized above that platform layer.

So, what does the Long Tail mean to a designer?

As designers, we are prone to thinking that we are creating the ideal solutions for “everyone” (or at least the best possible solutions under the circumstances). The long tail comes to demand humility. It means recognizing that your definitions of relevance are particular to your own experiences and your personal daily processes. So are everyone else’s.