March 29th, 2005
Centred or Informed?
This has been rattling around my head for a good 9 months now and I think it’s high time I went into labour so to speak.
About 18 months I got into the whole User Centred Design approach. I championed the use and creation of Personas on particular projects, got into user flows and scenarios, conducted user interviews and performed other research. This was all before any design was done. This really got me thinking and Jeff Veen’s latest post sparked me into action.
Is UCD too dogmatic?
User Centred Design is just that, a design process with the user at the centre. It’s a widely used process, and works very well in producing a product that the user can use.
The thing is, and what Jeff hints at in his post, is that things aren’t always that cut and dry.
UCD is quite a rigid methodology, some would say dogmatic. It requires resources — money and people, but most importantly it normally requires a culture shift either within an organisation or on the part of a client. Here lies the problem.
Culture shifts
Culture shifts are time consuming, expensive and don’t always work. Key stake holders have to buy into the shift very early on and drive that change from the top. Even less ‘top down’ organisations have to have a key figure motivating that change across the divisions that need it. But UCD process is fundamentally a company wide shift in approach and culture. Let me give you an example.
A print design company, established over 15 years ago, offers a full service to it’s clients from Branding and Signage to Websites. It’s website offering has grown from brochure ware sites, to complex applications. It’s team has therefore grown to include more web specialists rather than print designers. The creative director is the linch-pin of this company — what he says goes — and he’s steered the company’s creative direction for 15 years.
So, you’ve got this company whose creative director is used to working in a particular way which has served the company and industry well. I like to call it the “Designer Knows Best” model (hmmm, DKB methodology, got a ring to it don’t you think?). All of a sudden a shift of culture is required by the company to meet market demand. UCD rears it’s head. And all of a sudden, it’s not about methodologies, it’s not about users, it’s about designers and their egos — end of story.
Maybe this example is a little cut and dry, but the fact of the matter is designers are taught to be problem solvers from a very early age (in career terms). Especially in print/branding circles it is the designers who deliver solutions (true, research generally informes these solutions) but rarely does the dogma of a UCD process enter into it.
User Informed Design methodology
What i’m talking about here is user research informing the design process. In UCD, this is formalised. You conduct tests, you design, you test again — iterate, iterate. Don’t get me wrong it’s a good model, but in a competitive market, where budgets are tight, there is simply not the resources, or impetus to change culture for a UCD process to be followed.
What i’d like to talk about is instead of User Centred Design methodology, many of us have already adopted a User Informed Design methodology.
The key differences between the two are:
- Past experience. Use past experience rather than repeat user research
- Get down and dirty. Adopt a similar working model to SCRUM. Get in there and start prototyping and designing straight way. Test informally as you go along.
- Graphic designers do graphic design. Use research to guide functionality and UI — not graphic design. (I’m sure many graphic designers feel disenfranchised by Information Architects and Usability Designs solving a lot of the problems and leaving it up to the designs to “do the pretty stuff”)
- Boost ego. If your Creative Director is a bit a dictator, work with him to get at least some testing done but try not to prove him wrong — he won’t like that. Try and prove him right, that way next time you propose more testing he’ll probably say yes.
- Forget science. Scientifically gathered samples and the subsequent agency fees for recruiting are expensive. Unless you want to adopt a strict UCD approach and have the budget and will to do it, forget the scientifically gathered sample.
In conclusion…
So some of this may not come as a surprise. To conclude, it’s really all about being more flexible, relying on internal resources and your own experience with working with users before. It’s about getting down and dirty with prototypes early and let the user research inform the design rather than dictate it.
Interesting — I find design and business philosophies that resonate with me contain some semblance of balance. This is the case here — I too find UCD, in some forms, to be a bit too dogmatic.
I also find that projects that would require a lot of culture shift on the clients behalf are just not worth the effort. Sometimes it’s a struggle just to sell the concept of prototyping. I tend not to seek out those clients a second time.
Yeah I agree mark. I think a big component here is scope of your projects. Just like you, I had subscribed to the UCD process/principles. But I think I had to take it as that, principles. If I understood the idea behind what the big boys do, I could bring it down to my situation and choose what could be utilized and what was unecessary.
For me a large part of UID comes to your #1 item, professional hunch. In many situations as long as your *mentally* focused an seeing the users perspective, you can make the big decisions. I love what veen is saying. Whenever I’ve explained putting the users first in design, I always come back to the idea of the ‘Pretender’ TV show. It’s like having a type of empathy that can put you in someones shoes. You can absorb everything you can about the user. Then you try to *become* them, sit down and look at things from their angle. Everything comes from whatever you can learn about them from interviews, research, yada yada yada. But the magic is being able to draw creative solutions out of that understanding, and continually doing it through all the work from design, interaction, writing copy, choosing colors, or anything else that happens.
I think in the end, it will come down to the individuals or teams’ state of mind more than the scientific process followed. In other words, that print director…well might as well fire him because he probably will never understand true UCD even if you forced him to follow the process. :)
That’s a great comment Ryan. And Allan, you’ve got a good point about not working with clients who resist such a culture shift.
I guess my problem is that UCD, from a clients point of view, is seen as an expensive thing you do before a project starts. This is before the client actually sees anything (usually they want to see flashy designs right?)
Have you had resistance in estimates from that? I can imagine in large projects those early stages are very expensive. Most of my work are for more intimate projects and I don’t run into that. Curious what kind of projects you do, how much it runs, and how people respond.
Yeah, I’ve had some resistance but some clients have been really open to it. In fact it’s the reason why some clients would choose working with me rather than a more design focussed agency.
The challenge with other clients who may be retisant to the, in their opinion, additional cost is to work with the user centric approach being adopted as a cultural shift — something that is integral to the entire process, it’s not just the ‘extra’ thing you do at the beginning.
People generally respond well to the user centric approach. They seem to understand the benefits and of course you are talking their language — eg the customers or the audience of their site.