Is user-centered design not the right model? Should we be more concerned with the activity?
Moderator: Robert Hoekman Jr. [rhjr.net]
Sarah Bloomer [sarahbloomer.com]
Mark Schraad [schraadsblog.com]
Christina Wodtke [Boxes and Arrows]
Schraad: Says user-centered design is important, but even more important is to realize there’s only so much you can learn from them; many of our motivations are unconscious. Seek out additional information from varied sources.
Bloomer: You can’t ask users what they want, b/c they don’t know. Instead design unexpected experiences that people will enjoy. Look for subconscious motivations, but don’t ask for them.
Bloomer has apparently set her PowerPoint on a 20 sec rotation, and she is talking incredibly fast to try to keep up. She is not quite succeeding.
People aren’t just users….they come to the game with expectations, other demands on their time, goals, etc.
She says at the beginning that profiles aren’t useful but she’s describing these incredibly detailed use cases she builds for her sites….
Bottom line, she says, don’t ignore users but also balance their info with experiences and tasks to get the full picture.
Hoekman: Used to be at GoDaddy. Wrote Designing the Obvious.
Problem w/ UCD: Takes too long to meet business goals. Users don’t know what’s possible. They aren’t application designers.
Kathy Sierra: [not on this panel] The more successful a product or service is, the more the pressure to give into user requests, but one user’s must-have feature is another’s deal-killer.
Robert Norman says you should design for the activity, not the user. With activity-centered design, you let people adapt to the technology. People change, but tasks are stable. H. says you can do ACD much faster than UCD.
Look for trends, not for individual comments. When do you talk to users: When you’re out of your area of expertise.
H says, it’s not our users’ job to know how to design a great system, it’s their job to use it.
Bodtke: How do you know you’re right? ha, good point.
Hoekman: Tracks customer support calls. After releasing one new product, no calls, good.
Bodtke: So you’re a fan of genius design?
Heh.
Schraad: Also not an advocate of having users drive product or design. Research and testing should not direct design, but inform design decisions.
Hoekman: You don’t need to know a lot about people using a particular application, but instead on how people use the computer in general. And you have to know a lot about the application and the topic. He DOES advocate thinking about the user as you design, but not doing tons of user research.
Bodtke: UCD is a crutch to avoid conflict with business people who have a particular goal in mind that we know is not effective. This is a great point.
Audience question: Is redesign better or rolling redesign better?
Hoekman: This is always an issue with existing products. Work your way there incrementally. I believe the major redesign should die.
Schraad: There are existing processes we’re comfortable with that are still broken. If you can create a better experience for the user, you should.
Hoekman: It’s a great opportunity for good customer service. Let people know what’s coming.
Hoekman: I’m not just saying you should ignore users b/c they’re idiots. It’s quite the opposite: I care so much about my users I want to create a great experience for them and the goal is to come up with something even better than they would ever have expected.
Bodtke: Web search is a great example of something that can’t use a persona — everyone can use it — and look at the design that resulted: one box, one button.
Schraad: How do you infer design decisions from something as static as a persona?
Bodtke: How do you deal with clients who have already created personas for you to work with?
Schraad: I wouldn’t trust anything the client gave me. I would work to understand the problem.
Everyone agrees with Schraad.
Audience comment: Uses personas to get buy-in from many stakeholders before beginning a project to avoid redoing later. Good point.
Bloomer: You have to earn the trust of your clients [to get the right design in the end].
Bodtke: Everyone is cheap, people don’t want to use designers, engineers etc. until the end, but then they can’t be effective. Bring everyone in on the front end to inform decisions.
Hoekman: There’s a terrible risk when everyone has a seat at the table, and you’re trying to reach a consensus. Someone needs to make the call in the end.
Audience question: Are there designers so talented, intelligent that they don’t have to follow these processes, but there are a lot of people who think they fall into that category but clearly don’t. How do you know if you’re that designer?
Great question.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow. It really sounds like no one on the panel understands what UCD is or how user research is correctly conducted in usability engineering. Neither UCD nor proper user research involves asking the user to design the product. UCD means designing a product compatible with the psychological tendencies and limits of the user. It means using our knowledge and methods of cognitive psychology to make products that naturally communicate with the user by their mere appearance. The best way to understand the tendencies and limits of users in a specific area is to study them. User research is the primary way to learn about the activity. That’s what task analysis and functional analysis are all about, the two key pre-design forms of user research in usability engineering. To say we should design for the activity and not do user research is self-contradictory
Michael, I tend to agree with you. There are certainly aspects of what Hoekman described as “activity-centered design” that I found appealing, namely that users should not be asked to design the site. But to ignore them — that sounds nonsensical to me. And in fairness I think there were one or two on the panel that felt you should ask users, work with them, test their experiences — but then use those results to inform and guide your design, though not necessarily to direct it.
I think in many industries, there’s a feeling that your clients are stupid, or that they won’t know what we’re talking about until we tell them what they should think — it’s always something to guard against. Because to my mind, consumers are the geniuses in the room….and can easily take their money elsewhere if we don’t get it.