Category: Red Bridge news

User-centred design is dead?

…the key to great innovation is ignoring what users want, and instead boldly showing them the way. These messages are seductive. It’s encouraging to tell ourselves that we, the innovators, know best, and Henry Ford was right to dismiss customers as folks who would simply ask for “a faster horse”.

No, according to Sohrab Vossoughi in Innovation Always Starts With Empathy; Look at Zipcar and Even Apple,

the reason great design companies don’t ask what people want is that they are the users of the products themselves, so they already know.

And if you don’t have it, then you need to get empathy to be the target market!

Steve Krug is an acknowledged expert on usability testing. Over the years he has come up with a very usable(!) technique for picking up usability problems on websites. And he’s made it so easy that everyone (with a penchant for it) can do it. I bought his book and it’s great. As an accompaniment to the book he provides this user testing video to help get the idea. Watch it, it’s only 25 minutes:

• Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug: Usability Demo

Just discovered a good article by Sam Ng of UX Matters who gives us the benefit of years of user testing experience particularly around card-sorting: Card sorting: mistakes made and lessons learnt.

I’ve found the same experience. For example,

I’ve accepted the fact that card sort analysis—much like usability test analysis—is often messy and subjective. It’s part science, but mostly art. As with many aspects of our work, there isn’t necessarily a single correct, quantitative answer, but rather a number of different qualitative answers—all of which could be correct. Our job is to use our experience and our understanding of people to make judgment calls.

Usability testing guru  Jakob Nielsen explains how important our previous experience of the web is to determining how we interact with sites in his latest Alertbox article, Mental models.

From the perspective of a long time observer, he writes about user behaviour:

It’s amazing how one misconception can thwart users throughout an entire session and cause them to systematically misinterpret everything that happens on the site. Through failure after failure, they never question their basic assumptions. This is yet another argument for complying with preexisting user expectations whenever possible. If you don’t, then make certain that you’re clearly explaining what you’re doing…

He goes on to say…

When you see people make mistakes on your site, the reason is often because they’ve formed an erroneous mental model. Although you might be unable to change the UI at that point, you can teach users a more accurate mental model at an earlier stage of the user experience. Or, you might have to acknowledge that users won’t understand certain distinctions and then stop making those distinctions.