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People-centered Design

  • People?
  • Centered?
  • Design?
  • Experience
  • Quality?
  • Data
  • People?
  • Centered?
  • Design?
  • Experience
  • Quality?
  • Data

Making better things, or making things better?

Maybe the tagline would be better if we added some words to it “Improving the quality of our reflections on the quality of (user) experience design”.

The often-overlooked question is whether we (UX, design and product management professionals) are expending enough energy reflecting on what works and what doesn’t. Today it still seems to be the case that people argue for the financial (commercial) benefits of following a UX process  or of design in general, without addressing the question about how we can ensure the quality of that design process and how that quality affects the financial benefits that are due. 

Two ideas are important in addressing this question:–

  1. are we talking of the quality of the design, the design process or the resultant experience? And if we are looking at the experience, then whose experience?
  2. how do we address the subjectivity inherent in judging the quality of creative artefacts? Which leads on to the question as to who should be the judge of ‘design quality’?

 

A recent job advert I saw had quality management as a responsibility, defined as “Experience Design quality management – ensure all design is accurate and in line with our design guidelines.”  This is a very internal sense of quality and it doesn’t address the question of the quality of the actual user experience.

These ideas and questions bring us to the heart of people-centred design.

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Opinions

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Can we judge design from a single concept?

In the real world of commercial product design it is not uncommon for (UX) designers to spend most of their time working on the nuts and bolts (pixels and screens) of a single concept.

A map of whose journey?

Journey maps, experience roadmaps, customer experience journeys are all common tools nowadays, but a key question that needs to be asked is "whose journey are we mapping?" and is that the right person?

Don’t write interview guides

If you are going to meet with users and do some qualitative research then I hope you have had it drilled in to you to carefully construct an interview guide. Now, I ask you to remember that lesson, but throw away the interview guide!

Experience Strategy or Design Strategy

Brand strategy and design strategy seem to be well understood terms, but the idea of an experience strategy seems to be a step too far for many.

Usability considered harmful!

Not necessarily the same as gathering input from users, 'usability' often implies a rigorous testing of a product or interface (in A-B testing or similar). But such rigorous, data-driven processes can arguably be quite detrimental to successful product or service design.

Methods / Tools

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Writing a good conversation guide

Look, Listen, Try, Feel

The IDEO Methods cards were initially created as an internal tool, to help everyone see that design research was not a singular methodology, and that there were many, many options.

Examples

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Three-ring Binders
Three-ring Binders
Before being engaged on innovation in 3-ring binders, qualitative surveys had found that the snap of the three rings was not a problem for users and we were directed to look for innovation elsewhere.
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Buying headphones
Buying headphones
How do you properly understand the motivations behind a particular choice of a pair of headphones? Surveys and focus groups generate similar answers, but they just don’t feel credible.
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© 2025 David Gilmore