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Design redundancy and layers of defense: that’s Swiss cheese.
An important approach is resilience engineering, with the goal of designing systems, procedures, management, and the training of people so they are able to respond to problems as they arise.
Resilience engineering is a paradigm for safety management that focuses on how to help people cope with complexity under pressure to achieve success.
continue to invest in anticipating the changing potential for failure
Design Principles for Dealing with Error
Given the mismatch between human competencies and technological requirements, errors are inevitable. Therefore, the best designs take that fact as given and seek to minimize the opportunities for errors while also mitigating the consequences. Assume that every possible mishap will happen, so protect against them. Make actions reversible; make errors less costly.
Engineers and businesspeople are trained to solve problems. Designers are trained to discover the real problems.
Good designers never start by trying to solve the problem given to them: they start by trying to understand what the real issues are. As a result, rather than converge upon a solution, they diverge, studying people and what they are trying to accomplish, generating idea after idea after idea. It drives managers crazy. Managers want to see progress: designers seem 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. And not just one, but many. What is going on?
Two of the powerful tools of design thinking are human-centered design and the double-diamond diverge-converge model of design.
Human-centered design (HCD) is the process of ensuring that people’s needs are met, that the resulting product is understandable and usable, that it accomplishes the desired tasks, and that the experience of use is positive and enjoyable.
but with an emphasis on two things: solving the right problem, and doing so in a way that meets human needs and capabilities.
Everyone has his or her own favorite method, but all are variants on the common theme: iterate through the four stages of observation, generation, prototyping, and testing.
FIGURE 6.1. The Double-Diamond Model of Design. Start with an idea, and through the initial design research, expand the thinking to explore the fundamental issues. Only then is it time to converge upon the real, underlying problem. Similarly, use design research tools to explore a wide variety of solutions before converging upon one. (Slightly modified from the work of the British Design Council, 2005.)
The Design Council divided the design process into four stages: “discover” and “define”—for the divergence and convergence phases of finding the right problem, and “develop” and “deliver”—for the divergence and convergence phases of finding the right solution.
This is where the human-centered design process comes into play: it takes place within the double-diamond diverge-converge process. There are four different activities in the human-centered design process (Figure 6.2):
spiral method
1. Observation 2. Idea generation (ideation) 3. Prototyping 4. Testing
it is essential to understand the real situations that they encounter, not some pure isolated experience. This technique is called applied ethnography, a method adapted from the field of anthropology.
Design wants to know what people really need and how they actually will use the product or service under consideration. Marketing wants to know what people will buy, which includes learning how they make their purchasing decisions.
Designers understand what people really need. Marketing understands what people actually buy.
the next step for a design team is to generate potential solutions. This process is called idea generation, or ideation.
PROTOTYPING The only way to really know whether an idea is reasonable is to test it.
Prototyping during the problem specification phase is done mainly to ensure that the problem is well understood.
The only exception is that even if the normal usage is by a single person, it is useful to ask a pair of people to use it together, one person operating the prototype, the other guiding the actions and interpreting the results (aloud).
How many people should be studied? Opinions vary, but my associate, Jakob Nielsen, has long championed the number five: five people studied individually.
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.
Any system that does not allow for special cases will fail.
How can we pretend to accommodate all of these very different, very disparate people? The answer is to focus on activities, not the individual person. I call this activity-centered design.
Activity-centered approaches are human-centered approaches, far better suited for large, nonhomogeneous populations.
I emphasize the need to design for activities: designing for tasks is usually too restrictive. An activity is a high-level structure, perhaps “go shopping.” A task is a lower-level component of an activity, such as “drive to the market,” “find a shopping basket,” “use a shopping list to guide the purchases,”
Iterative methods are designed to defer the formation of rigid specifications, to start off by diverging across a large set of possible requirements or problem statements before convergence, then again diverging across a large number
The iterative method, however, is best suited for the early design phases of a product, not for the later stages.
The best methods combine the benefits of both iteration and stage reviews. Iteration occurs inside the stages, between the gates. The goal is to have the best of both worlds: iterative experimentation to refine the problem and the solution, coupled with management reviews at the gates.
Physical anthropometry
Designing for people with special needs is often called inclusive or universal design.
The best solution to the problem of designing for everyone is flexibility: flexibility in the size of the images on computer screens, in the sizes, heights, and angles of tables and chairs.
Even where a lack of usability or understandability is deliberate, it is still important to know the rules of understandable and usable design, for two reasons. First, even deliberately difficult designs aren’t entirely difficult. Usually there is one difficult part, designed to keep unauthorized people from using the device; the rest of it should follow the normal principles of good design. Second, even if your job is to make something difficult to do, you need to know how to go about doing it.
Safety systems pose a special problem in design. Oftentimes, the design feature added to ensure safety eliminates one danger, only to create a secondary one.
Now it is time to examine the concerns outside of human-centered design that affect the development of products. I start with the impact of competitive forces that drive the introduction of extra features, often to excess: the cause of the disease dubbed “featuritis,” whose major symptom is “creeping featurism.”
This causes me to examine the two forms of product innovation relevant to design: incremental (less glamorous, but most common) and radical (most glamorous, but rarely successful).
After all, there are only a few basic ways by which a manufacturer can compete: three of the most important being price, features, and quality—unfortunately often in that order of importance.
No, it’s what is called the Zeitgeist, a German word meaning “spirit of the time.” In other words, the time was ripe, the ideas were “in the air.”
FEATURITIS: A DEADLY TEMPTATION In every successful product there lurks the carrier of an insidious disease called “featuritis,” with its main symptom being “creeping featurism.”
After all, when products from two companies match feature by feature, there is no longer any reason for a customer to prefer one over another. This is competition-driven design.
Quality only comes about by continual focus on, and attention to, the people who matter: customers.
diagonally sloping arrangement of keys and its even more arbitrary arrangement of their letters. Christopher Latham Sholes designed the current standard keyboard in the 1870s. His typewriter design, with its weirdly organized keyboard, eventually became the Remington typewriter, the first successful typewriter: its keyboard layout was soon adopted by everyone.
Two Forms of Innovation: Incremental and Radical There are two major forms of product innovation: one follows a natural, slow evolutionary process; the other is achieved through radical new development.
Radical innovation changes lives and industries. Incremental innovation makes things better. We need both.
Most design evolves through incremental innovation by means of continual testing and refinement.
