User-Centered Design

The phrase “user-centered design” (UCD) is showing up in the industry press these days – and as usual, the original concept that the phrase was intended to communicate is being diffused, misrepresented, and undermined so that firms can appear to be following the trend while continuing to maintain business as usual.   I don’t expect anyone can prevent the perversion and dismissal of a good idea, as it happens with distressing regularity, but it’s worth pausing to reflect on what it means in hopes that it might have some small impact.

There’s nothing particularly cryptic about the concept and its name is quite straightforward: user-centered design is about crafting products and their associated interactions (acquisition and servicing) to focus on the needs and interests of the individual who will eventually benefit from using it.   This is what often occurs when a company is created to serve a need, and it is often lost along the way as the firm becomes focused on other things, such as its competitive posture, internal procedures, and financial performance.

UCD begins with the notion that people are failing to accomplish something, either through lack of a method to accomplish it or through the use of methods that are ineffective and/or inefficient.   A project that discovers a new solution generally begins with studying the users to discover what problems they have, and one that improves and existing product generally begins with a problem and seeks to find users who are experiencing it.  

Whatever the case, the UCD process begins when there is a “who” (the user) and a “what” (their goal).   From there, the next step is generally to consider how they are currently attempting to accomplish this goal (or to substantiate the idea that they are not accomplishing it at all) to identify deficiencies and areas of improvement.    And finally, the process proposes and tests an alternative solution to discover whether it will be successful at accomplishing the goal in a manner that is more efficient and effective than the present one.

All of this is quite elementary, and very different from the problem-solving process that focuses more on the product, the market, or the financial  consequences to the firm – which is the trap into which many established firms (and even some start-ups) tend to fall.   And ultimately, UCD is the path to success and growth: customers do not purchase a product because of the process by which it is manufactured or the degree to which it generates a profit for the firm that provides it.  They purchase products because they efficiently and effectively deliver value in solving their problems or achieving their goals.

The innovation-squelching problem with an established firm is that it seems to forget the basic principle that revenue is earned by helping people solve their problems.  Profitability is grown by making existing operations more efficient without improving the product or its associated interactions.  The market is grown by making the product seem more appealing that it is so that people who will not get value from it will purchase it anyway.   There are an innumerable array of bad, counterproductive, and unethical ideas for increasing profit without increasing service.   None of these come from a process of user-centered design, and a process of user-centered design that is practiced as intended will not yield such ideas.

And the core problem is that firms seek to pursue projects that are not user-centered, and which are obviously ill-conceived, but to do so while claiming to be doing UCD in hopes that their proposals will be accepted without further inquiry.   This muddies the term and causes it to be maligned, as others see the activities being done under the label of UCD that are not UCD at all – but because it is called that, they assume that it is.

The litmus test to identify impostors is simply to ask those follow-up questions:

• Who are the users?
• What problem are they trying to solve?
• How does this proposal help the users to solve that problem?

Where there are no answers to these questions, or where the answers are twisted and contrived, it is clear that the undertaking has nothing to do with user-centered design.   It may be marketing, or efficiency improvement, or some other manner of task that, while possibly worth pursuing, is not really a user-centered approach.

My hope is that those who attempt to leverage the faddishness of UCD in order to disguise the true nature of their projects will find another term.  But my expectation is that they will not, and that UCD will become just another meaningless buzzword, like so many others before it.   But one can always hope.