UCD and Innovation

Hi all,

I realise from the majority of responses I've got that I wasn't very clear in presenting my original thought. I'll start this by expressing what I am not insinuating.

I was not suggesting that UCD is about asking users what they want. It's well documented in numerous circles that asking a user what they want is not a good idea. As Alan Cooper says

"It's my experience that neither users nor customers can articulate what it is they want, nor can they evaluate it when they see it. Neither the people who buy software nor the people who use it have the capability of visualizing something as complex as the behavior of software. They also don't have the ability to analyze what appropriate behavior is."

I think as a community we've long since stopped using focus groups or misguided testing to tell us what to make.

I am also not saying that one cannot innovate within a user centred design process. A good design/HCI team can come up with creative solutions to the problems flushed out with what Ryan Powell has described as explorative and validating research. Indeed we can innovate in meeting and discovering the expressed and unexpressed needs of the user. This is mostly what we're paid to do.

My point is specifically about deriving inspiration for product development from explorative techniques such as ethnography. This kind of detailed examination of user behavior can 'corral' one into thinking about certain solutions to a problem. You set a trajectory of thought in a manner of speaking.

Good UCD can facilitate huge advances in user experience. That's not disputed. But usually, on a conceptual level, we achieve incremental change. Debono talks about 'lateral thinking' which is the only semi-formalised technique I know of, to facilitate leaps of evolutionary change in solutions to a paradigm.

Example: In 1962, Douglas C. Engelbart at the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA conceived something we can hardly imagine living without nowadays. It was the computer 'mouse'. This was a massive evolutionary leap in thinking about computing and HCI. I'd argue that had the inspiration for this project been derived from traditional explorative research, we'd not have come so far, so quickly. Sure, someone would have thought of it at some point in some form. But, in 1962? People were still using punch cards to tell the computer what to do back then, weren't they?

So, what I'm driving at is NOT that UCD isn't extremely valid and worth practicing - always. Heck, I spend so much of my working life championing it and mentoring others in its techniques that I get tired of the sound of myself. I'm really just trying to raise a question. Where in a process, is it not the best tool for the job? What is the best tool for the job?

Anthony Colfelt
  Senior Designer | BBCi Development & Services
    6th Floor | Bush House - NW | Strand | London WC2B 4PH
      PH: 0207 557 3471 | MOB: 0779 617 4878
        [email protected]



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