Rule: Never solve the problem I am asked to solve
The problem I am asked to solve is not the real, fundamental, root problem
- "How do you know you solved the correct problem?"
- "Where do you think the problems come from?"
- Engineers, businesspeople: Trained to solve problems
- Designers: Trained to discover the real problems
Good Designers
- never start by trying to solve the problem given to them
- Start by trying to understand what the real issues are
- Studying people and what they are trying to accomplish, generating idea after idea after idea
- have developed a number of techniques to avoid being captured by too facile a solution
- Take the original problem as a suggestion, not as a final statement
- think broadly about what the issues underlying this problem statement might really be
- resist the temptation to jump immediately to a solution for the stated problem
While managers want to see progress, designers seen to be going backward when they are given a precise problem and instead of getting to work, they ignore it and generate new issues to consider, new directions to explore. Not just one, but many.
- Finding the right problem
- Start by questioning given problem (discover)
- Expand the scope of the problem. Diverging to examine all the fundamental issues that underlie it (define)
- Converge upon a single problem statement
- Finding the right solution
- Expand the space of possible solutions (develop)
- Converge upon a proposed solution (deliver)
- Finding the right problem
- Fulfilling human needs
How the two phases of design done? Human-centered design process comes into play
- Observation
- Idea generation (ideation)
- Prototyping
- Testing
These activities are iterated. They are repeated over and over.
- Observation
- The initial research to understand the nature of the problemA
- The design researcher will go to the potential customers
- Observe the would-be customers in their natural environment
- Follow them into the shower if necessary(!)
- The design researchers have the goal of determining human needs that can be addressed through new products
- Product cycles are driven by schedule and budget, both of witch require rapid assessment
- Traditional measures of people (age, education, income..) are not always important
- Activities to be performed are important
- Will it be used in the country? Don't take a shortcut and stay home, talking to students or visitors. Go there!
- Idea generation (ideation)
- brainstorming
- Generate numerous ideas It's dangerous to become fixated upon one or two ideas too early in the process
- Be creative without regard for constraints Avoid criticizing ideas. Avoid premature dismissal of ideas.
- Question everything Ask stupid questions. The obvious often is not obvious at all
- brainstorming
- Prototyping
- Build a quick prototype or mock-up of each potential solution
- The mock-ups can be sketches, foam and cardboard models
- During the problem specification phase, it's done mainly to ensure that the problem is well understood
- During the problem solution phase of design, real prototypes of the proposed solution are invoked
- Testing
- Gather a small group of people who correspond as closely as possible to the target population
- If the device is normally used by one person, test one person at a time
- The research team should be observing, behind those being tested (Video recording)
- Get more detailed information about their thoughts
- Five people studied individually, is a good number
- During the problem specification phase, it's useful to ensure that the problem is well understood
- During the problem solution phase, ensure that the new design meets the needs and abilities of those who will use it
The role of iteration in human-centered design is to enable continual refinement and enhancement
The goal is rapid prototyping and testing
Fail frequently, fail fast
Deliberate tests and modifications make things better. Failures are to be encouraged
Failures shouldn't be called failures: they should be thought of as learning experiences
- Requirements made in the abstract are invariably wrong
- Requirements produced by asking people what they need are invariably wrong
- Requirements are developed by watching people in their natural environment
Most cases are "special", any system that does not allow for special cases will fail
With each cycle, the tests and observations can be more targeted and more efficient, the ideas become clearer
The time iteration process end: This is up to the product manager, who needs to deliver the highest-possible quality while meeting the schedule
No matter how much time the design team has been allocated, the final results only seem to appear in the last twenty-four hours before the deadline
- Design
- wants to know what people really need and how they actually will use the product or service under consideration
- Designers tend to use qualitative observational methods by which they can study people in depth, understanding how they do their activities and the environmental factors that come into play
- These methods are very time consuming, so designers typically only examine small numbers of people, often numbering in the tens
- Marketing
- wants to know what people will buy, which includes learning how they make their purchasing decisions
- Concerned with customers - who might possibly buy? What factors might entice them to consider and purchase a product?
- Marketing traditionally uses large-scale studies with surveys, and questionnaires
- converse with hundreds of people in focus groups, and to question tens of thousands of people - "Big Data", "Market Analytics", "A/B testing"
Deep insights on real needs from a tiny set of people v.s. broad, reliable purchasing data from a wide range and large number of people
- Designers understand what people really need
- Marketing understands what people actually buy
- Activities
- High-level structure
- e.g., "Go shopping"
- Tasks
- Low-level structure
- e.g., "Find a shopping basket", "use a shopping list to guide the purchases"
Focusing upon tasks is too limiting: good example is Apple's success with its music player
Within the heads of the workers. When workers leave, their implicit knowledge goes with them. The management of large projects is a difficult challenge.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
The HCD process is ideal, but the reality of life within a business often forces people to behave quite differently from that ideal. A company professes to believe in user experience and to follow human-centered design, in practice there are only two drivers of new products:
- Adding features to match the competition
- Adding some feature driven by a new technology
Do we look for human needs? - No.
The day a product development process starts, it is behind schedule and above budget
How to prevent?
The way to handle the time crunch that eliminates the ability to do good up-front design research is to separate that process from the product team: have design researchers always out in the field, always studying potential products and customers. Then, when the product team is launched, the designers can say, "We already examined this case, so here area our recommendations." The same argument applies to market researchers.
Designers must please their clients, who are not always the end users
In businesses, purchasing departments make decisions for large companies; and owners or managers, for small companies. In all these cases, the purchaser is probably interested primarily in price, perhaps in size or appearance, almost certainly not in usability. And once devices are purchased and installed, the purchaser has no further interest in them.
In some situation, cost dominates. But how about training costs? Maintain costs? Productivity?
Usually the different company divisions have intelligent people trying to do what is vest for the company. When they make changes to a design, it is because their requirements were not suitably saved. Their concerns and needs are legitimate, but changes introduced in this way are almost always detrimental. The best way to counteract this is to ensure that requirements, and repairs and returns. This way, all the concerns can be heard as soon as they are discovered.
Design is a complex activity. But the only way this complex process comes together is if all the relevant parties work together as a team. It isn't design against engineering, agains marketing, against manufacturing: it is design together with all these other players. Design must take into account sales and marketing, servicing and help desks, engineering and manufacturing, cost and schedules. That's why it's so challenging. That's why it's so much fun and rewarding when it all comes together to create a successful product.
- Any door designed to keep people in or out
- Security systems, designed so that only authorized people will be able to use them
- Dangerous equipment, which should be restricted
- Dangerous operations that might lead to death or injury if done accidentally or in error
- Hide critical components: make things invisible
- Use unnatural mappings for the execution side of the action cycle, so that the relationship of the controls to the things being controlled is inappropriate or haphazard