Building or redesigning an important website can be like buying a starter home. You think it’s the solution to all your problems, but sooner or later you discover that it has problems of its own. The upkeep is a lot of work. One thing is certain if you are building a family: There will come a time when you outgrow your starter home, and you’ll notice that it seems like the house was built for someone else. A close examination of the house reveals that, in some instances, you just weren’t that important in the grand scheme of things.
For instance, the contractors used composite hardboard siding instead of wood, vinyl or cement, and it seems to not withstand the rigors of the environment like the other things might. Since hardboard is slightly cheaper than the alternatives, that part was built for the builder’s bean-counter… not for you.
When you encounter your first plumbing issue, the master plumber who comes in to fix it laments that when the builder installed the pipes, they didn’t seal them. That part was built for the construction workers, so they could get to their break quicker. It wasn’t built for you.
Who is your website built to serve?
It doesn’t always have to be this way, but in many cases, websites are built through a series of processes, negotiations and compromises – much like a house. However, it is primarily built to solve problems. Therefore, the design team must agree on which problems they are trying to solve, and in what order.
There are several ways to approach the problems you identify.
Recently I had the pleasure of attending the 2nd Annual Big Design Conference in Dallas (#bigD10). Our keynote speaker was Jared Spool (@jmspool), founding principal and CEO of User Interface Engineering. His presentation, “The Anatomy of a Design Decision,” included an excellent perspective on user-centered design.
What is “User-Centered Design?”
The traditional definition of user-centered design can be explained this way (from Wikipedia):
“User-centered design can be characterized as a … problem-solving process that not only requires designers to analyze and foresee how users are likely to use an interface, but also to test the validity of their assumptions…”
“The chief difference from other interface design philosophies is that user-centered design tries to optimize the user interface around how people can, want, or need to work, rather than forcing the users to change how they work to accommodate the software developers’ approach.”
User-centered design can be broken into 4 categories.
- Self-Design – The designer is the user. This is not traditionally considered user-centered design, but it can be effective when the designer is designing for himself or when other users are exactly like the designer.
- Genius Design – When the designer intimately knows the user and the space for which he’s designing and can apply the patterns he’s learned without researching everything from scratch.
- Activity-Focused Design – When the designer is focused on what the user does and verifies through research and testing. This is the benchmark for traditional user-centered design.
- Experience-Focused Design – Through extensive research and deliberate execution, persuades the intended audience to perform a desired action and elicits appropriate emotion that makes the experience memorable. True experience design transcends the medium and is the hardest to plan.
User-centered design is, at its core, a philosophy, not a rule. It stands in opposition to three other types of design.
- Unintentional Design – If this occurs, one of two things is true: Either the designer is absolutely clueless or has tried to stretch an architecture designed for one thing to serve purposes for which it was never intended to serve.
- Technology-Centered Design – This occurs when you’re more concerned about “features” on the platforms you already own or have access to than you are how the user could interface with those platforms – and why they would even want to.
- Ego-Centered Design – This is a variation of “Genius-Design” masquerading as “Self-Design.” The difference is that with Self-Design, the designer (whether he be an actual designer or simply a stakeholder who is hijacking the process through the exertion of power, intimidation or influence) actually is the primary user of the design in question. With Ego-Centered design, the designer simply presumes that everyone thinks like him — denying evidence to the contrary.
Getting to Good
There’s an old adage that production managers seem to like to use when estimating a project or allocating resources. It goes something like this: “Quick, Inexpensive and Quality. Pick two of the three.”
(Image credit: Adam Polansky)
Strictly speaking, this isn’t even true. Sometimes you can have only one. There are always limitations with any project. There are always going to be trade-offs, and discovering what isn’t negotiable is part of the process of getting to good design.
That really boils down the design process to its essence. Good design is primarily about solving a multitude of problems: for the user, the marketing group, the IT group, the finance group and the design group.
The value of a design can be broken down to its parts — such as usability, usefulness, desirability, etc., but if it doesn’t solve at least one key problem that synchronizes what your users want and what you provide, it is doomed to fail.
Instrumental to solving these problems is making sure you honestly identify what the real problems are — asking the tough questions up front to make sure you don’t go down the wrong rabbit hole. This requires confronting the uncomfortable truth that you may be using one design method when you mistakenly believe you’re using another.
For Further Reading
The Elements of User Experience (PDF)
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June 8th, 2010 at 10:19 am
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