Seroquel xr….

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.