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.
No comments:
Post a Comment