DON'T DESIGN FOR AVERAGE USERS

Summary from the TLDR Design newsletter

Designing for the average user is a mistake because digital behavior follows skewed distributions rather than normal bell curves. Most users are either casual "tourists" with minimal engagement or ultra-engaged "whale" users in the 95th-99th percentile who generate disproportionate business value. Companies should design for the radical asymmetry between median (P50) and high-end (P95) users rather than optimizing for phantom averages.