Some designers all in a huff about a post written on fast company arguing against user-led innovation. It’s flying through my Twitter stream and just came into my inbox via my dear friend and Poynter colleague Jose Kusunoki. He sent it out to our Poynter list-serve asking what we thought about the following quote.
The Apple and IKEA way
Take Apple. One evening, well into the night, we asked some of our friends on the Apple design team about their view of user-centric design. Their answer? “It’s all bullshit and hot air created to sell consulting projects and to give insecure managers a false sense of security. At Apple, we don’t waste our time asking users, we build our brand through creating great products we believe people will love.”
Below is my critique on the commentary folks are making about the post, rather than the post itself. In short, all I’m trying to say is, calm down.
I think a lot of things about this. It’s passing like wild-fire through my twitter stream right now. First of all, not every company is, can be and should be like Apple.
Building brand and product are certainly related but are not the same thing. In this post,it seems the two words are being used interchangeably. The writer here also is confusing user-centered and user-led. Attention to brand, identity, marketing, product, design, motion, function and many other elements are crucial. They live together in an ecology. But they are not all the same thing.
User-led design puts a product in front of some people, they give feedback and you redesign based on their feedback. Crudely, you could say it disregards the judgement of the designer.
User-centered, however, in my opinion, designs for the need, pain points, problems, pleasures and other elements per required by the user, and many other factors. This method considers feedback from users. But feedback, research and findings are one element of many qualitative and quantitative data points that inform the design. Along with, yes, judgement from the creators of the product or service (designers, developers, managers, etc).
One is designed for users. One is designed by users. I advocate for the first, this post and possibly Apple seems to be arguing against the second.
We’re not god. We’ll never know how people are going to understand, interpret or use the things we design. Did anyone know newspapers would make awesome hats in the rain? No. But turns out, they do.
3 replies on “Let’s not confuse ‘user-centered’ and ‘user-led’”
good clarification. 🙂
I think you make a good argument separating user-led from user-centered. One is putting users in the driver’s seat (wrong), one is getting to the heart of a specific problem or opportunity. But I will say this is a very fine line and we as designers have to watch for, because user-centered design is not necessarily the ‘design formula’. There is no design formula at all, which is something they need to say at the beginning of EVERY HCI/d class. Design is generative, not deductive.
There’s a reason I don’t do focus groups or “participatory design” – because I think it doesn’t work. [Insert Henry Ford quote about his customers asking him for a faster horse]. What user-centered design gives you, and user research in particular, is a better understanding of a world you may not fully understand. When I ride-along with sales reps in the field I’m learning about a world I previously did not know anything about, which means I am now more well-equipped to design for these people. I could take their requests and map them directly, but I wouldn’t be doing my job.
If we were to create a generalist product like the iPad, user-centered design sort of falls apart. This is because it’s a product designed for humans (“everyone”) and not a specific group. User-centered design, and moreover user research works when you need to design for a very specific group and may know nothing about their work or lives or values. It doesn’t work when you have to “design for everyone”, this is where intuition kicks in.
BTW, Jens Martin Skibsted is a branding guy. He’s clearly trying to ruffle some feathers and make more of a name for himself and his business, which is in the business of BRANDING. In his bio he says his firm values branding-led design over traditional design methods, so take that for what it’s worth. Also, he calls himself an ‘ideator’, which is just another way to say ‘bullshitter’. I think there are a lot of people in our industry who like to toot their own horn about the ‘right way’ to do something when in fact nobody really knows WTF they’re doing.
Great post and comments.