User-centered design (UCD), while not perfect, stands a chance to help improve the world fairly dramatically. How many times have you bought a product that looked great, but the moment you actually got it home and tried to use it you realized the people who designed it never ever had actually tried using it themselves? You end up throwing it out, giving it away, or returning it. We’ve all seen products that make you wonder why the company that made it even bothered. Enter user-centered design (UCD), a set of ideas, methods, and really an attitude about how to create things.
Crowd, from Flikr-Victoriapeckham
Yet those who practice UCD often become SO incredibly focused on the user that we can forget about all the other important people involved in a product, service, or experience: those that need to approve the decision to make that thing. We are so intent on making beautiful useful things that people love that it’s easy to forget that we have a whole slew of internal and possibly external stakeholders that we need to convince. Some of the top people who practice UCD have the skills to sell their designs, but many many others do not. We know how to study people, but we only really want to study and understand users. That engineering guy, that management type, that head of a business unit? No way, we study people but not those people.
When will we start to understand not only those who will use the thing we are designing but those who must help create it and those that must approve it, then we are becoming more inclusive and dare I say it–more effective because those things we design are more likely to actually make it into the hands of those that will experience them.
This post is inspired by lots of conversations I’ve had with people and in fact is part of the basis of my PhD research.
I’m so glad you’re thinking about user-centered design this way… I see this a lot where I work, where designers throw their designs over a “wall” and A) expect someone else to understand it, and build it, and B) get offended when it doesn’t happen. I think all designers need to realize that a constraint of designing is the environment and culture in which they work. Some people see UX designers as “button makers”, others see UX designers as advocates of users whose advice is “optional”. Good ideas, fancy drawings, and authorship value has to be rethought of in terms of teams, process, and development.
I touched upon this in a paper/book “The Design Keepers”. http://www.primopollo.com/img/downloads/TheDesignKeepers-email.pdf
Some user-centered designers (UX Designers?), who come from backgrounds that support and sustain design value as a quality of authorship, lack the ability and skills to work (design) with others. But that’s not the world we live in. Design is no longer a craft, where tools dictate output. The value of design doesn’t belong to individuals. And within organizations, it certainly does not belong to a handful of “user advocates” – instead design value has be instilled by all stakeholders. User-centered designers need to understand others within their organization as well as understand “users”. Makers of things can only make things for others if they understand themselves AND others. It’s about influence, teaching, and inspiring others…
I wrote a few ideas about how UX designers can work with others recently. http://www.primopollo.com/?p=826.
Great post. Keep it coming.
Hey Matt,
Sorry I’ve been slow on the uptake, I thought this comment was from a previous post. I suck, we need to talk more I think.
In my work I’m addressing the idea of “throwing things over the wall” more directly. I’ll post about that in the next month or so as I develop a longer journal article on it.
In a way I think you’re advocating a design as a kind of shared organizational competence. I like the idea of it, but can we expect everyone to do it? Who do we target for such things?
I’d love to talk more offline about how that works in your workplace.
I need to read your post and the comment Chad made on it, and then comment there or here or both. I think we should consider writing up some of these ideas into a provocative piece that could go into Interactions magazine or Johnny Holland or UXmatters or similar. We need to get people talking about this more.
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