User Centered

Management / User Centered — 1 Comment
27
Apr 11

Drucker and User-Centeredness

While I was reading Tims Brown’s “definition” of design thinking for the x-time now, I actually never checked his reference to Peter Drucker. Drucker is, according to wikipedia the “best-known and most widely influential thinkers and writers on the subject of management theory and practice”. True or not, I was quite curious about what he wrote on the subject so I searched his book, “The Essential Drucker” for converting need into demand and found the following in the chapter entitled “The Purpose of Business”:

“It demands that business start out with the needs, the realities, the values of the consumer. It demands that business base its reward on its contribution to the customer…. It will force business to become market-focused in their actions as well as in their pronouncements.” (p. 16)

Seems like a quite strong statement, taking Drucker’s reputation into account. But be aware that, also its sounds like a great statement for user-centered design, the argument was done to clarify the role of marketing and innovation (the “only two” basic functions of a business, according to Drucker).

Design / User Centered — No Comments
19
Apr 11

Q&A with Charls Eams

I stumbled upon the reference to this video just yesterday and immediately had to check if there is a version online. Although it seems as it has been cut, concerning the date (1972) it could be considered quite visionary. This makes one wonder if we have learned anything new in the last (almost 40) years. It seems like design is still trying to catch up to this ideal state, described in the video.

A transscipt of the video can be found here. Would have loved to see the original (if there is an un-cut version).

User Centered — No Comments
19
Feb 11

User-Led Innovation Can’t Create Breakthroughs

Just came accords this identically named article on fastcodesign. Wondering why somebody writes User-Led Innovation since I always thought it’s user centered innovation. Therefor finding unmet opportunities by understanding and observing (future) users, not by ask the users what they want. Who does that anyway? Of course a user can’t predict the future, and even if they “knows” what they want its most likely that they come up with “faster horses” (to paraphrase Henry Ford). We all know that, so, in my point of view, someone who really thinks that this is the way to go forward didn’t really get the point of user centered innovation. In addition I think someone has to be also critical not to miss the another point of the article which draws attention to the fact that there are other sources of innovation which got less attention at the moment, but which are equally important.

And, in the end, it is not – most of the time – the user that limits the radicalness of innovations,but the companies themselves which are unable or unwilling to met the challenges that radical innovations bring with them.

Design Thinking / User Centered — No Comments
20
Apr 10

Why we don’t care

This TED-Video by Daniel Goleman – the psychologist who coined “emotional intelligence” – made me think, if this might be the reason why d-school students often skip user testing due to time constrains, although they know that it might be important.
If this is the case, it might be a good reason to plan in some extra time for user-testing.
Although it might not seem that relevant for a lot of designers, since user testing is more often seen as a constrain than helpful, it’s quite interesting to know what makes people pissled (combination of pissed off and puzzled). Especially if you refer to Bruce Nussbaum who just wrote that “B-Schools And D-Schools Should Listen To The Cultural Context of the SEC Lawsuit Against Goldman” and used this example to point out the importance of the social context.