The Bottom-Up Approach to Design

There are two approaches to take when designing an interface: bottom-up and top-down. In top-down, you first consider what the user needs are. Take a long and broad look at all the people in the world who could potentially use your product and figure out what features and components they would like as well as what workflow would best suit them. This I call "top-down" because you start with a large audience and narrow it down. This methodology can be alright if you have no idea what you want to do and you want to start by solving some existing problem.