Human-Centered Design is not the be-all end-all
Good Design is an incredibly delicate balance. While I’m often busy fighting to get people to do usability evaluation at all, there are places where Human-Centered Design has become the one true philosophy. Don Norman reminds us that users don’t know everything:
One basic philosophy of HCD is to listen to users, to take their complaints and critiques seriously. Yes, listening to customers is always wise, but acceding to their requests can lead to overly complex designs. Several major software companies, proud of their human-centered philosophy, suffer from this problem. Their software gets more complex and less understandable with each revision.
Here, what is needed is a strong, authoritative designer who can examine the suggestions and evaluate them in terms of the requirements of the activity. When necessary, it is essential to be able to ignore the requests. This is the goal to cohesion and understandability. Paradoxically, the best way to satisfy users is sometimes to ignore them.
Sometimes what is needed is a design dictator who says, “Ignore what users say: I know what’s best for them.” The case of Apple Computer is illustrative. Apple’s products have long been admired for ease of use. Nonetheless, Apple replaced its well known, well-respected human interface design team with a single, authoritative (dictatorial) leader. Did usability suffer? On the contrary: its new products are considered prototypes of great design.
Human-Centered Design does guarantee good products. It can lead to clear improvements of bad ones. Moreover, good Human-Centered Design will avoid failures. It will ensure that products do work, that people can use them. But is good design the goal? Many of us wish for great design. Great design, I contend, comes from breaking the rules, by ignoring the generally accepted practices, by pushing forward with a clear concept of the end result, no matter what. This ego-centric, vision-directed design results in both great successes and great failures. If you want great rather than good, this is what you must do.
Don Norman in ACM Interactions, July-August 2005 as posted on Don Norman’s site.
Thanks Usability in the News, which pointed me to the article on paper & pencil.
While this is great for Design, it is still necessary to evaluate interfaces in some fashion—designers won’t always catch everything and they need to be informed by how people actually use their products. Of course, this advice is mostly going out to those who already are designing and have an actual design team. The rest of us just need to remember that finding great designers (who understand when and where usability evaluation is necessary) will always beat mechanically following any kind of human-centered formula. If this seems interesting, I recommend going back and reading the full article.