From its earliest chapters, Gabrielle Zevin’s popular novel on friendship and gaming, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2020) proves to be a wise work of fiction—full of great lines and observed truths about creation and connection.

In the beginning stages of the newly-formed bond between gamers Sam Masur and Sadie Green—who meet by chance in a hospital game room when they are 11 years old—Sam begins drawing intricate mazes for Sadie to solve. While his psychologist speculates the drawings are Sam’s way of coping with his pain from the car accident he’s survived, Sam later recalls them as ‘his first attempts at writing games’.

Yet within this prodigious origin story—’revisionist and self-aggrandising’ in Sam’s memory—is the simple truth that Sam was drawing the mazes ‘for Sadie’.

From this admission, Zevin offers a pearly creative insight:

To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it.

While it can’t be assumed that Zevin’s claim applies to all digital creators and their products, there’s an argument to be made that it should. Video games are inherently interactive, so the game designer is necessarily imagining the experience of the player as he makes the game.

Steve Jobs, in his visionary designing of Apple products, famously asserted that ‘you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology’.

In digital media and marketing, the ‘audience-first’ approach has become a vital strategy. You need to know the customer you want to reach, intimately, and then figure out which channels to use to reach them.

Yet when it comes to digital writing—and to the vast and growing market of digital products being created today—it’s not often explicitly stated that the products should be designed with the user in mind.

It stands to reason this principle should be the first law of digital creation:

Imagine the person who will be using the product, and design it for them.