The Red Bridge

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.