Is the user stupid?

It's the user, stupid

User-Centered Design & Prototyping

Is the user stupid?

It's the user, stupid

User-Centered Design & Prototyping

Phases of UCD

  1. Understand
  2. Create
  3. Deliver

Redesign the reading
experience

Empathize

Interview 1

  • What, why, how, where
  • Pre-/post-experience

Empathize

Interview 2

  • Emotional
  • Surprising
  • Interesting

Analyze

Data immersion

  • Common themes
  • Surprises
  • Esssence

Needs vs Solutions

  • Jane needs a car (bad)
  • Jane needs a way to get around quickly (good)
  • Jane needs to be at her son's birthday party (better)
  • Jane wants to build a loving relationship with her son (great insight, but can be more focused)

Synthesize

Problem definition

Ideate

Sketch crazy ideas

Feedback

Share ideas

  • Don't sell ideas
  • Learn, not validate
  • Pay attention to reactions

Iterate

Reflect & generate a solution

  • Modify existing idea, or
  • Combine aspects of different ideas, or
  • Something new

Prototype

Build

  • Interactive
  • 3D
  • Can be experienced

Prototype

Forms

  • 3D models
  • Paper prototype
  • Storyboard
  • Role-playing
  • Wizard of Oz

Feedback

Experience prototype

  • Don't sell prototype
  • Assume what you built was wrong
  • Pay attention to reactions

Feedback

Demo

Reflect

What's different

  • Engaging in a real person
  • Unfinished work

Why UCD

To satisfy the cat

The User

Generic person

Users

Understand

  • Who are the users?
  • What is important to them?
  • What is the baseline?

How to Understand

  • Have beginner's mindset
  • Select users to engage
  • Immerse, imitate
  • Go beyond what people say

Create

  • Analyze
  • Synthesize
  • Ideate
  • Prototype
  • Test
  • Iterate

Deliver

  • Evaluate
    • Desirable
    • Feasible
    • Viable
  • Deploy
  • Monitor
  • Iterate

Prototyping

Ideas -> World

Prototyping

Goals

  • Understand
  • Explore
  • Inspire
  • Communicate
  • Validate

Prototyping

Benefits

  • Fail fast and cheap
  • Divide and conquer different aspects
  • Resolve ambiguities
  • Engage stakeholders

Prototyping

Plan

  • Goals and questions
  • Scope: what to focus or not worry about
  • Fidelity: low vs high detail
  • Form: materials, environment
  • Hypothesis of behaviour

Prototyping

Mindset

  • Build to think
  • Don't commit too early
  • Create something to react to, not just a scaled version
  • Let users experience more than one prototype
  • Iterate*

*Iteration is an indicator of design success and engineering experience. [Adams, R. 2002. Understanding design iteration. In Proceedings of Common Ground International Conference, London, Design Research Society.]

Prototyping

Sharing

  • Don't overexplain
  • Don't correct
  • Suitable context
  • Get users to think aloud
  • Get help to record observations

Prototyping

Analysis

  • Patterns
  • Grouping of themes
  • Tensions, surprises
  • Visualizations

From UCD to HCD

Human-centered design considers other humans

  • Clients
  • Distribution
  • Partners...

Learn more: IDEO HCD Toolkit, dschool Design Thinking Bootcamp

UCD and Innovation

The Landscape

Innovation can be of 3 types: incremental, evolutionary, revolutionary

UCD and Innovation

Designer as facilitator

  • Coaxing revolutionary ideas can be very hard
  • Variable abilities in ideating and imagining
  • Humans don't mean what they say, don't know what they need, are unaware of what they believe in
  • Experts may be needed to envision radical tech

What can I do?

  • Observe user testing sessions
  • Find out how your work relates to real users
  • Less hunch- and lemming-driven, more data-driven
  • Fight for time to experiment
  • For ****'s sake, iterate

Takeaways

Design is not about pretty things

Flowery image

Takeaways

Design is not about sleek and cool products

Nest thermostat

Takeaways

Design is a messy process in the journey to a solution

Doodles

Takeaways

Get out of the office

Typical office

Because your users are not there

Credits

Images (in order of appearance)

  • liz west, "Manuscript", https://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/306564541, CC Attribution 2.0, with modifications to lighten image;
  • Roland O'Daniel, "blueberry's storyboard 2", https://www.flickr.com/photos/rlodan01/5321531740, CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0, with modifications to lighten image;
  • Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/en/man-user-profile-person-icon-42934/, CC0 Public Domain;
  • Luc Legay, "My Social network", https://www.flickr.com/photos/luc/1824234195, CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0, with modifications to darken image;
  • Pieter Kuiper, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lightblue_empty_grid.svg, Public Domain;
  • IDEO, Human Centered Design Toolkit 2nd Edition, Page 135, CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0;
  • Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/en/flowers-floral-design-flora-color-98164/, CC0 Public Domain;
  • Nest, "Nest Learning Thermostat showing Celsius", https://www.flickr.com/photos/nest/6286566200, CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0;
  • Luise von Mecklenburg-Strelitz, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Luise_Kritzelzeichnung.jpg, Public Domain;
  • Phil Whitehouse, "New office", https://www.flickr.com/photos/philliecasablanca/3344142642, CC Attribution 2.0;
  • Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/en/japan-tokyo-shibuya-japanese-217882/, CC0 Public Domain;

Worksheet from d.school, CC Attribution-NonCommercial, with modifications to challenge and timings.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Suggestions or errata? Contact TW Hoon at GitHub (username: hoontw).