Remember, Sally doesn’t know. - Saurabh Biyani - Medium

Who is Sally?
Sally is a character in a popular psychological test called ‘The Sally — Anne Test’.

What is this ‘Sally — Anne Test’?
Let’s take the test to understand it.
In a room, there are two dolls — Sally and Anne. Sally has a basket and Anne has a box.

Sally takes a marble out of her pocket and hides it in her basket.

She then leaves the room and goes for a walk.

While she is away, Anne takes the marble out of Sally’s basket and puts it in her box.

Sally then returns to the room to fetch her marble.

Now you have to answer a simple question : ‘Where will Sally look for her marble?’ The answer is quite obvious. She is going to look for the marble in her own basket. That’s where she had left it.

But, autistic people and kids below age four fail miserably in this test. They answer the question with “Anne’s Box”. They fail to recognise the simple fact that — Sally doesn’t know what they know (They know that the marble is in Anne’s box). They believe that Sally’s knowledge is exactly same as theirs.

How is this related to User Experience design?
We quite often start to design a product (meant to be used by other users) on the basis of our knowledge, beliefs and motivations. Like the 3 year old kids in the Sally-Anne Test, we forget to acknowledge the fact that others (users) may (almost always) have a different belief, intention, desire and perspective.

(User = Sally)
(UX Designer = 3-year old kid)

This leads to a poor User Experience. Though the product looks reasonable to the UX Designer’s eyes, but it sucks to the Users’ eyes.

How do we effectively solve this problem?
Being mindful and developing an ability to see through the users' eyes are the only ways to ensure that your Product has a great User Experience.

At an early stage of your product design cycle, an effective way to do this is by using User Personas. Here is a step by step approach —

1. Figure out your User base. Figure out who are you going to focus on and who are you going to ignore. The user that makes the most noise may not necessarily be your Target. Also remember, you cannot take care of all the users, so you have to prioritise.
2. Research on your target User base. Meet them, question them. Understand their emotions, their likes and dislikes, and the scenarios where they will use your product. Try to figure out what might delight them and what might ruin their experience. Understand why they do (or do not) care about using your product.
3. Create a Persona. Pick out the relevant traits that you have observed in your research and create a character with those traits. Detail out your character (the way you would do in a video game). Give her a name, age, and a face. Write down about who she is, what her motivations are, where does she live and all other details you feel are relevant. It should neither be too generic, nor too specific.
4. Now start looking at your Product with your Persona’s eyes. Get methodical here. Become your persona for some time and start feeling like her. Now start trying your product wireframe or prototype (add some checkpoints). At each checkpoint, figure out your emotions and motivations, figure out what you liked, what you didn’t like, what you cared about and what didn’t matter to you. Determine what were you really looking for, how easy was it to find that, or was it even there. Note everything down.
5. Make changes to your product on the basis of your observations and start again from Step 4.

There are other ways which are more effective at a later stage of your product design cycle. These primarily include — taking your wireframe/prototype directly to your users or analysing the user activity on your product after they start using it.

So the next time, when a new feature sounds super exciting and highly useful to you, take a step back. Enter into your users’ shoes, and start observing through their eyes. You will soon realise that the same feature may not be as exciting and useful for them. It is highly likely that their perspective, beliefs, likes and dislikes, will be totally different from yours.

Remember, Sally doesn’t know. That is going to make all the difference. After all, you cannot be a 3 year old kid while designing your product.