定义：

designing for oneself rather than for the audience/users. 

According to Alan Cooper in books like About Face and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, "The web developer or content owner is not like a more typical user, so their savviness and familiarity with the material actually prevents them from being able to solve the users’ problems ... This happens in environments where user testing doesn’t happen or analytics data are ignored. "

避免self-referential design的有效方法：

1）创建用户画像（personas）；

2）遵循用户心理模型（mental model of user），也叫做用户概念模型（conceptual model of user），而不是软件运行机制的实现模型（represented model of software）。