In the dim distant past, some of us used to distinguish our work from the masses by declaring proudly that we were ‘user-centered’. At one time this actually meant you did things differently and put a premium on the ability of real people to exploit a product or service. While the concern remains, and there are many examples of designs that really need to revisit their ideas about users, I find the term ‘user-centered’ to have little real meaning anymore. It is not just the case that everyone claims this label as representative, after all, who in their right mind would ever declare their work as not user-centered and still expect to have an audience? It is more a case that truly understanding the user seems beyond both established methods and established practices.
I will leave aside there any argument about the term ‘user’. Some people have made careers out of disimissing that term and proposing the apparently richer ‘person’ or ‘human’, but the end result is the same (though I prefer to talk of human-centered than user-centered myself). The real issue is methodological.
First, claiming adherence to user-centered methods and philosophies is too easy; anyone can do it. Ask people what they would like to see in a re-design and you have ‘established’ user-requirements. Stick a few people in front of your design at the end and you have ‘conducted’ a usability test. Hey presto, instant user-centered design process. If only!
Second, and more pernicious, the set of methods employed by most user-centered professionals fails to deliver truly user-centric insights. The so called ’science’ of usability which underlies user-centeredness leaves much to be desired. It rests too much on anecdote, assumed truths about human behavior and an emphasis on performance metrics that serve the perspective of people other than the user. ISO-defined usability metrics refer to ‘efficiency’ and ‘effectiveness’ and ’satisfaction’. These do not correlate so one needs to capture all three. But who gets to determine what constitutes effective and efficient anyhow? In many test scenarios this is a determination of the organization employing the user, or the thoughts of the design team on what people should do, not the user herself. Maybe this should be called organizational-centric or work-centric design. If I wanted to start a new trend I could probably push this idea into an article and someone might think I was serious.
What is often overlooked is that the quality of any method is determined far too much by the quality of the evaluator who employs it.. Evaluation methods are all flawed, that much is a given, but it is the unwillingness of many people to recognize these shortcomings that should give us all real concern. Here’s but one example. The early Nielsen work on heuristic evaluation has given rise to the ‘fact’ that evaluators find about 35% of usability problems following his method, and if you pool several reviewers you can get a better hit rate. What many people overlook in this is that the 35% figure is not calibrated with real user problems but is based on Nielsen’s own interpretation of the problems users will face. So the 35% claim is really a claim that following his method, you will probably find a third of the problems that Nielsen himself estimates are real problems for users. This is a very different thing. It is interesting that in my own tests with students, this 35% figure holds pretty firm, which is impressive, but you cannot lose sight of what that percentage relates to or you will misunderstand what is going on.
Now of course, there are great evaluators out there but even if all evaluators were great, that would not change the problem with user-centeredness as it currently exists. Too much evaluation occurs too late to matter. OK, this is an old story but what’s changed since this story was first heard? Not enough. If user-centered design really is limited to evaluating and designing for a narrowly construed definition of usability then there is little prospect of change. For a limited range of tasks where I want to be efficient (finding a number in my cell-phone, for example, then current practices are fine, as long as I can prototype quickly) but for the type of deeply interactive tasks that I might spend large parts of my day engaged in (reading, communicating, exploring data etc.) then talk of ‘effective’ and ‘efficient’ rings more hollow. But it is preciely this next generation of application opportunity that we need to explore if we are to augment human capabilities. The old usability approach is fine for applications where we are making digital that which used to be performed with physical resources (text editing, mailing, phoning, calculating) but it’s not a great source of help for imagining new uses.
If we could de-couple user-centered design and usability then there might be some benefit but I don’t think this is as important as it might first appear. More important is the very conception we have of users and uses for which we wish to derive technologies and information resources. Designing for augmentation is a very real problem and a great challenge for our field theoretically and practically.
chad | 19-Feb-08 at 4:07 pm | Permalink
From Chad:
I wholeheartedly agree that the term user-centered (user-centric, ugh) is reaching buzzword status. It’s becoming a feel-good word managers can throw around to gain credibility. I also agree that its practice is somewhat… “impoverished.” But this impoverishment is not due to the UCD methods themselves, or even the skill of those employing UCD (usually). In my experience, the problem is one of stakeholder expectations about the amount of research UCD involvement required to ship a good product.
In my experience, most stakeholders understand that good design requires some contact with real users, but there are always pressures to deliver products more rapidly and more cheaply. I like the old adage, of FAST, CHEAP, GOOD – pick two, you can’t have all three. I have seen UCD failures occur most frequently because the design team was not able to sell the stakeholders on performing adequate research to inform the design. In this scenario, some UCD is done, but not enough and so assumptions and guesses are made and the resulting design suffers, not because of UCD, but because of the lack of it. Meanwhile, the stakeholders will of course talk up how their product was usability tested, and what a difference it made, further watering down the notion of UCD.
It is up to us as designers and UCD practitioners to battle this – to make the case for more complete and holistic UCD activities in our projects and to take ownership of the whole user experience, not just the “usability” aspect. During the last couple of years, I have seen consideration of the “whole experience” really catching on. I try to think of my role as helping to make a product usable, useful, and desirable and I structure my work towards those ends. I harp on this “trinity” of design endlessly, and after awhile, people catch on. This approach can open doors to doing the kind of user research and UCD needed to gain those insights that lead to great products.
I should add that it takes great leaders to structure teams (people) and work so that research and design efforts flow into and feed one another resulting in good design and rapid turnaround without sacrificing quality. This is truly a daunting task.