I noticed a recurring theme during SXSW design-oriented panels and discussions: the need to rethink the role of user testing and research. Web Designers have long advocated user testing, contextual inquiry, and other user-centered design methods. Too often, user feedback may improve a product or site’s usability, but the results don’t exactly quicken the pulse. The problem is that folks are comfortable with what is familiar. But we’re in an era when user interfaces are taking a great leap forward. For example, imagine showing a mobile phone user a low-end Nokia phone back in 2005. You observe how she uses the different features and applications and even ask for tips on how to enhance the phone’s usability. Chances are that she would not say, “Get rid of the plastic keyboard buttons and make everything touch screen. Oh and I want to be able to ’see’ my voicemail
and I should be able to zoom in and out by pinching my fingers.” It may sound heretical, but here’s the thing: people don’t always know what they want. But as soon as something extraordinary comes along, they embrace it.
Julia Hanna’s HBS Working Knowledge article, “Radical Design, Radical Results,” puts it this way:
“Focus groups and market research can help to define a product, of course, but Verganti has found that design-driven innovation is not user-centered. Instead, it comes from within the organization. “Rather than being pulled by user requirements,” he wrote recently, “design-driven innovation is pushed by a firm’s vision about possible new product meanings and languages that could diffuse in society.”
User research will remain an integral part of the design process, but to achieve something special, could it make sense to ignore your customers for awhile?
:: Billy Hylton
