What’s wrong with UCD?

Nothing, as long as you approach UCD (User-Centered Design) as an over-arching philosophy and general framework for considering people in the design of a product, in addition to all the other concerns. Held lightly in the mind as a “mode of thought”, UCD can be very useful in helping those who are engineering-centric or accounting-driven to broaden their perspectives and take into account other priorities and values as well as the mainstay of features and profits. In other words, the priorities of people, the actual users of the product, become a primary focus with the other critical issues. Of course, there is no one “end all, be all” UCD definition, or method, or diagram, or pledge of allegiance, or anything like that. It’s all exceptionally diverse with multiple flavors used by different companies/designers, but  bound by an overall premise: people matter.

In my view, UCD is really just about taking the product’s users into account, balanced with business and technical concerns, along the lines of the rhetorical balance. Interpreted through the lens of shaping an effective argument, UCD activity should really be a deliberative process of discovering the right balance of trade-offs, constraints, priorities, and values when collaborating with product managers, engineers, marketers, and other participants in a highly complex product development process.It’s not about the primacy of one “UCD method” versus another “UCD method”, or the centrality of a specific user research deliverable over all else (much of which should be taken with many grains of salt anyway) and taken as “starter fodder” to have something to work with.

However, there is great discussion in various circles about the semantics of the term, with focus on the actual literal meaning of the specific words (e.g., user centered design) as being exclusive of business and technical concerns. It’s a fair point to argue as many do on ixda for instance…perhaps creating more confusion along the way :-) As purely a label, it just seems to me that UCD has become a de facto, commonplace, accepted phrasing used in conversations with business and technology leaders. The phrase has gained traction across the high-tech industry, design academics, new design graduates, and so forth. There’s a general gist of what’s meant by it that most people grasp well enough. That’s mainly why I have accepted the label and simply moved on; besides, I’m too busy designing to worry about what to call the damn thing :-) The bottom line is that designing something involves multiple centers regardless; the trick is how to balance them altogether…

What we need to be clear on is what UCD is NOT:

  • UCD is not simply “giving what the user wants”; designers are NOT short-order cooks and most folks have no idea what they truly want (beyond vague phrases like “make it simpler, easier, intuitive, get rid of all the buttons, bigger icons, etc.”), or have difficulty expressing their desires accurately
  • UCD is not a commodotized recipe for an “easy to use” design; just like any design activity, there’s iteration, fast-failure, re-visiting issues, and yes mistakes do happen!
  • UCD activity and decision-making should not be ignorant of other concerns (business, technical, etc.)
  • UCD is not a panacea that will fix all problems; product design problems are often way more complicated than simply “what’s best for the user”, often requiring inputs and trade-offs with various departments, teams, professionals, etc.
  • UCD is not an exclusive, guaranteed approach. It is one approach to design that is best taken with several grains of salt, and perhaps better when mixed with other approaches (Activity-oriented, “Genius”-oriented, etc.)…The master designers know how to tactfully blend, which comes with years of experience of course.

What’s still perplexing for many folks is how to account for supposedly “non-UCD” successes like the iPod, iPhone, Dyson, Michael Graves collection at Target, etc. (Although you can argue that people were considered at the forefront of the designers’/engineers’ minds, just not in a regimented, exclusively method-centric fashion). Perhaps what’s needed is a better understanding of UCD thought & practice framed as just one part of a much greater (and complex) product development effort, as I suggested above… More on this soon.

Change vs. Experience

Surveying the rhetoric by the candidates vying to be the next president, two major themes emerge: change and experience. Each of the major candidates are trying to position themselves as embodying or representing one of those ideals. Hillary = Experience, while Obama = Change. McCain = Experience, while Romney/Huckabee = Change. But regardless of personal political affiliations and favorites, I can’t help but think as a designer that these themes are exactly what designers struggle with daily with clients and projects. Change and experience are simply inherent to design.

Change is fundamentally what design is all about, in my view. More accurately, positive change, for the better. As Herb Simon declared in what has come to be regarded as a canonical work of modern design theory The Sciences of the Artificial, “everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”. In this regard, designers are quite simply “change agents” in the conception, planning, and creation of solutions that help people. There are of course levels of change and impact, depending upon the contingencies, constraints and circumstances that define a given situation, or the scope of it. A change may involve the decision to use a different typeface as the corporate brand (see Apple), or commercializing technologies that support fluid, direct manipulation (see iPhone and Wii), or reshaping the entire business model with user participation (see Netflix or YouTube). There is change of the artifact itself, and of course change of user behavior and attitudes, towards a more positive user engagement and thus purchase/referral/repeat usage, favoring the business cycle. Darrel Rhea of Cheskin suggests there is a “continuum of innovation” from incremental improvements, to evolutions, to inventions, to entire industry transformations, that represent different fields of opportunity for designers.

Experience means a couple things for designers. There is of course the extensive background knowledge and past experience from prior clients and projects that help evolve a designer’s competency to shape/drive a vision in later situations. This kind of experience is an ongoing learning process, natural and necessary for future success. And there is the concept of designing to improve a user’s quality of experience or engagement, between himself and the “other”: product, service, system, environment, etc. It’s a complex milieu of psychological, phenomenological, and emotional issues/materials. Designing to improve the user’s experience has become a paramount goal for all designers, regardless of the resulting artifact, whether a poster or a system. Thinking about the quality of that engagement is a critical consideration when designing, in addition to the craft aspects of the artifact.

Finding a designer who has the experience to make change, that is hugely valuable! Such person must simultaneously hold passionate idealism, yet be able to arbitrate the practical realities of a situation, taking pragmatic courses of action to enable the ideals to manifest successfully in a realized form one can be proud of. To me that’s a powerful ideal to strive for, and perhaps the hardest to achieve as designers seeking to improve the lives of ordinary people.