On the Case for User-centered Design

Why should we take a user-centered approach to design? Norman’s book provides a good survey of the traditional arguments for user-centered design that are worth recording:

Unnecessary design

Designers have to make an individual stamp, their mark, their signature.... A mixed curse, individuality, for through the desire to be different come some of our best ideas and innovations. But in the world of sales, if a company were to make the perfect product, any other company would have to change it—which would make it worse—in order to promote its own innovation. (p.143)

Norman worries about designers making changes just for the sake of change, driven by their own ego or a market seeking shallow novelty or prestige. He advocates for a process driven by user goals to avoid empty, unnecessary design.

Connected to this is Norman’s identification of the problem of feature creep:

Creeping featurism is the tendency to add to the number of features that a device can do, often extending the number beyond all reason. There is no way that a program can remain usable and understandable by the time it has all of those special-purpose features. (p.173)

Form over function

The reward structure of the design community tends to put aesthetics first. Design collections feature prize-winning clocks that are unreadable, alarms that cannot easily be set, can openers that mystify. (p.151)

This is a pretty classic argument that tries to dispel the idea that designers just “make things pretty.” Of course, I think this is a somewhat coarse perspective to take since a more holistic view would recognize how aesthetics of objects are deeply connected to the way people experience and use them. Norman ends up agreeing with and exploring this point in his other books.

You are not the user

Designers are not typical users. They become so expert in using the object they have designed that they cannot believe that anyone else might have problems; only interaction and testing with actual users throughout the design process can forestall that. (p.151)

This is perhaps the fundamental issue that user-centered design is meant to address. If we believe the core of good interaction is something between the user and the designed system, then you naturally put understanding users at the center of your process, suppressing your own biases in the process.

Overall, I feel that user-centered design has been popularized enough that it informs many of the implicit assumptions of interaction design practice. At a general level, this has been good for elevating conversations about usability and design’s responsibility to people.

But at the same time, whenever a certain philosophy has become implicit in a practice, it is worth critically examining how it frames our conversations and how it may marginalize other potentially useful perspectives.

In the case of Norman’s formulation of user-centered design, I think there is an over-emphasis on the cognitive relationship between a user and an object, which tends to miss the point on broader social and cultural context. We end up getting the details right without fully considering the possibilities of what we are designing, especially in the complexities of interaction between people and communities.