September 16, 2003
Does User Centric Design sabotage creativity?
I know a fairly well respected person in the industry, who has started championing 'Designer Centred Design' which has the hackles on the back of my neck standing up.
This person's rationale is that as designers of interaction (or insert related job title), its our job to know what users can and can't do, not to ask them what they can and can't do (through testing or other means). This may appeal to the inner self-indulgent and lazy designer that I beat into remission some 4 years ago. But it does raise a few interesting points for the designer I am today.
Here's one...
If we're always asking for validation from our user base on everything we do from project start to project finish, where does innovation come into the frame? Surely if we are always making design choices based on what users can and cannot do, how do we introduce new (and preferrably learnable) mental models into our user's psychy? Does making something usable and understandable first and foremost, trounce any inspiration that may yield 'weird' or shall we say 'innovative' ways of defining a system model?
Posted by Ant at September 16, 2003 12:11 AM | TrackBackThis is a bit sad being the only one commenting on this... especially since I'm commenting on my original comment. Talk about flying up your own ass. Anyway...
I realise from the majority of responses I've got from the UCD list that I wasn't very clear in presenting my original thought. I'll start this by expressing what I am not insinuating.
I was not suggesting that UCD is about asking users what they want. It's well documented in numerous circles that asking a user what they want is not a good idea. As Alan Cooper says
"It's my experience that neither users nor customers can articulate what it is they want, nor can they evaluate it when they see it. Neither the people who buy software nor the people who use it have the capability of visualizing something as complex as the behavior of software. They also don't have the ability to analyze what appropriate behavior is."
I think as a community we've long since stopped using focus groups or misguided testing to tell us what to make.
I am also not saying that one cannot innovate within a user centred design process. A good design/HCI team can come up with creative solutions to the problems flushed out with what Ryan Powell has described as explorative and validating research. Indeed we can innovate in meeting and discovering the expressed and unexpressed needs of the user. This is mostly what we're paid to do.
My point is specifically about deriving inspiration for product development from explorative techniques such as ethnography. This kind of detailed examination of user behavior can 'corral' one into thinking about certain solutions to a problem. You set a trajectory of thought in a manner of speaking.
Good UCD can facilitate huge advances in user experience. That's not disputed. But usually, on a conceptual level, we achieve incremental change. Debono talks about 'lateral thinking' which is the only semi-formalised technique I know of, to facilitate leaps of evolutionary change in solutions to a paradigm.
Example: In 1962, Douglas C. Engelbart ( http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html ) at the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA conceived something we can hardly imagine living without nowadays. It was the computer 'mouse'. This was a massive evolutionary leap in thinking about computing and HCI. I'd argue that had the inspiration for this project been derived from traditional explorative research, we'd not have come so far, so quickly. Sure, someone would have thought of it at some point in some form. But, in 1962? People were still using punch cards to tell the computer what to do back then, weren't they?
So, what I'm driving at is NOT that UCD isn't extremely valid and worth practicing - always. Heck, I spend so much of my working life championing it and mentoring others in its techniques that I get tired of the sound of myself. I'm really just trying to raise a question. Where in a process, is it not the best tool for the job? What is the best tool for the job?