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People are flexible, versatile, and creative. Machines are rigid, precise, and relatively fixed in their operations. There is a mismatch between the two, one that can lead to enhanced capability if used properly.
Put the knowledge required to operate the technology in the world. Don’t require that all the knowledge must be in the head. Allow for efficient operation when people have learned all the requirements, when they are experts who can perform without the knowledge in the world, but make it possible for non-experts to use the knowledge in the world. This will also help experts who need to perform a rare, infrequently performed operation or return to the technology after a prolonged absence. • Use the power of natural and artificial constraints: physical, logical, semantic, and cultural.
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in design, the secret to success is to understand what the real problem is. It is amazing how often people solve the problem before them without bothering to question it.
Engineers and business people are trained to solve problems. Why would anyone ever give them the wrong problem? “Where do you think the problems come from?” I ask. The real world is not like the university. In the university, professors make up artificial problems. In the real world, the problems do not come in nice, neat packages. They have to be discovered.
They take the original problem as a suggestion, not as a final statement, then think broadly about what the issues underlying this problem statement might really be (as was done through the “Five Whys” approach to getting at the root cause, described in Chapter 5). Most important of all is that the process be iterative and expansive.
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.
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. But even before this, there is one overriding principle: solve the right problem.
The first phase is to find the right problem, the second is to find the right solution.
Designers often start by questioning the problem given to them: they expand the scope of the problem, diverging to examine all the fundamental issues that underlie it. Then they converge upon a single problem statement. During the solution phase of their studies, they first expand the space of possible solutions, the divergence phase. Finally, they converge upon a proposed solution (Figure 6.1). This double diverge-converge pattern was first introduced in 2005 by the British Design Council, which called it the double-diamond design process model.
The initial research to understand the nature of the problem itself is part of the discipline of design research. Note that this is research about the customer and the people who will use the products under consideration.
Design research supports both diamonds of the design process. The first diamond, finding the right problem, requires a deep understanding of the true needs of people. Once the problem has been defined, finding an appropriate solution again requires deep understanding of the intended population, how those people perform their activities, their capabilities and prior experience, and what cultural issues might be impacted.
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.
The different methods have different goals and produce very different results. Designers complain that the methods used by marketing don’t get at real behavior: what people say they do and want does not correspond with their actual behavior or desires. People in marketing complain that although design research methods yield deep insights, the small number of people observed is a concern. Designers counter with the observation that traditional marketing methods provide shallow insight into a large number of people. The debate is not useful. All groups are necessary.
Designers understand what people really need. Marketing understands what people actually buy. These are not the same things, which is why both approaches are required: marketing and design researchers should work together in complementary teams.
Once the design requirements are determined, the next step for a design team is to generate potential solutions. This process is called idea generation, or ideation. This exercise might be done for both of the double diamonds: during the phase of finding the correct problem, then during the problem solution phase.
How many people should be studied? Opinions vary, but my associate, Jakob Nielsen, has long championed the number five: five people studied individually. Then, study the results, refine them, and do another iteration, testing five different people. Five is usually enough to give major findings.
If everything works perfectly, little is learned. Learning occurs when there are difficulties. The hardest part of design is getting the requirements right, which means ensuring that the right problem is being solved, as well as that the solution is appropriate.
Getting the requirements right involves repeated study and testing: iteration. Observe and study: decide what the problem might be, and use the results of tests to determine which parts of the design work, which don’t. Then iterate through all four processes once again. Collect more design research if necessary, create more ideas, develop the prototypes, and test them.
When does the process end? That is up to the product manager, who needs to deliver the highest-possible quality while meeting the schedule. In product development, schedule and cost provide very strong constraints, so it is up to the design team to meet these requirements while getting to an acceptable, high-quality design.
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. Let the activity define the product and its structure. Let the conceptual model of the product be built around the conceptual model of the activity. Why does this work? Because people’s activities across the world tend to be similar.
Does this violate the principles of human-centered design? Not at all: consider it an enhancement of HCD.
One comment: there is a difference between task and activity. 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,” and so forth. An activity is a collected set of tasks, but all performed together toward a common high-level goal. A task is an organized, cohesive set of operations directed toward a single, low-level goal.
Design for individuals and the results may be wonderful for the particular people they were designed for, but a mismatch for others. Design for activities and the result will be usable by everyone. A major benefit is that if the design requirements are consistent with their activities, people will tolerate complexity and the requirements to learn something new: as long as the complexity and the new things to be learned feel appropriate to the task, they will feel natural and be viewed as reasonable.
In design, one of the most difficult activities is to get the specifications right: in other words, to determine that the correct problem is being solved.
The iterative method, however, is best suited for the early design phases of a product, not for the later stages. It also has difficulty scaling its procedures to handle large projects.
Decision gates give management much better control over the process than they have in the iterative methods. However, they are cumbersome.
iterative experimentation to refine the problem and the solution, coupled with management reviews at the gates.
the severe challenges of the product development process, in particular, the challenges of insufficient time and insufficient money.
The day a product development process starts, it is behind schedule and above budget.
Product development involves an incredible mix of disciplines, from designers to engineers and programmers, manufacturing, packaging, sales, marketing, and service. And more. The product has to appeal to the current customer base as well as to expand beyond to new customers. Patents create a minefield for designers and engineers, for today it is almost impossible to design or build anything that doesn’t conflict with patents, which means redesign to work one’s way through the mines.
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.
The design practices described by the double-diamond and the human-centered design process are the ideal. Even though the ideal can seldom be met in practice, it is always good to aim for the ideal, but to be realistic about the time and budgetary challenges. These can be overcome, but only if they are recognized and designed into the process.
It is difficult to do good design. That is why it is such a rich, engaging profession with results that can be powerful and effective. Designers are asked to figure out how to manage complex things, to manage the interaction of technology and people. Good designers are quick learners, for today they might be asked to design a camera; tomorrow, to design a transportation system or a company’s organizational structure.
In dysfunctional companies, each division of the company is skeptical of the value added to the product by the other divisions. In a properly run organization, team members coming from all the various aspects of the product cycle get together to share their requirements and to work harmoniously to design and produce a product that satisfies them, or at least that does so with acceptable compromises.
If people complained strongly enough, usability could become a requirement in the purchasing specifications, and that requirement could trickle back to the designers. But without this feedback, designers must often design the cheapest possible products because those are what sell.
It is just as important to study those who do the purchasing as it is to study those who use it.
representatives from all the divisions are present during the entire design process, starting with the decision to launch the product, continuing all the way through shipment to customers, service requirements, and repairs and returns. This way, all the concerns can be heard as soon as they are discovered. There must be a multidisciplinary team overseeing the entire design, engineering, and manufacturing process that shares all departmental issues and concerns from day one, so that everyone can design to satisfy them, and when conflicts arise, the group together can determine the most
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Many devices designed to aid people with particular difficulties fail. They may be well designed, they may solve the problem, but they are rejected by their intended users. Why? Most people do not wish to advertise their infirmities. Actually, many people do not wish to admit having infirmities, even to themselves.
Designing for people with special needs is often called inclusive or universal design. Those names are fitting, for it is often the case that everyone benefits.
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.
Fixed solutions will invariably fail with some people; flexible solutions at least offer a chance for those with different needs.
“Why can’t things be made simple?” goes the cry. Well, one reason is that life is complex, as are the tasks we encounter. Our tools must match the tasks.
I distinguished between “complexity,” which we need to match the activities we take part in, and “complicated,” which I defined to mean “confusing.” How do we avoid confusion?
The most important principle for taming complexity is to provide a good conceptual model, which has already been well covered in this book.
Standardization provides a major breakthrough in usability.
Standardize and you simplify lives: everyone learns the system only once. But don’t standardize too soon; you may be locked into a primitive technology, or you may have introduced rules that turn out to be grossly inefficient, even error-inducing. Standardize too late, and there may already be so many ways of doing things that no international standard can be agreed on.
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).
What? Did they steal the ideas? 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.” The competition emerged even before we had delivered our first product.
