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People-centered Design

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

What do we mean by design?

Design is a very slippery word and so it is necessary to take some space to define and discuss just what we mean by it.

This section will look at many varied facets of design and the experience of design across many different products and services.

Perhaps the first step is to simply list the words that often precede design 

  • experience
  • industrial
  • graphic
  • product
  • service
  • interaction
  • user interface
  • …

 

Jesse James Barrett view of experience design (above right) adds more to that mix (e.g. sensory design, navigation design, information design). Although he was very concerned with website design and web-based experiences, everything in his picture is still very important and is part of what has to be designed.

However, it is very much attached to a view of the usage by a single person of a single product. It doesn’t start to address design of the impact of this product on others, for example.  Insofar as one might claim that it does address them, then they would be in the ‘strategy’ layer (User Needs and Product Objectives).

Furthermore, a ‘designer’ is often trained (or has practised) in a few of these skills and rarely in all. Indeed, having a talent for one of these areas of design does not mean that the person has a natural talent in all the other areas.  Although many people call themselves ‘user experience designers’ and imply that they can cover the full-stack of design, my experience is that this is very rarely true.

And as soon as one is designing a piece of hardware as well, then a generalist UX designer is going to struggle.

Therefore, we need to embrace experience design as requiring a diversity of design talents, and thereby often requiring a team of designers, not a solo designer.

Returning to the question of the meaning of ‘design’, perhaps the best (simplest) encapsulation would be to say that design is the process of defining what it is that needs to be engineered, ideally in such a way that the builders of the product (or service) can know whether what they are building is actually what is wanted. And yet this is precisely where UX Design becomes a tricky concept, since the experience is not engineered, or manufactured, or sold – the designed components enable an experience (or not) but they don’t individually deliver it.

Perhaps the best example of this conundrum can be found in the world of home entertainment where almost every product involved has its own UI and its own apps and those apps may also have their own UI. Apart from deliberately buying all your TV components from the same brand, none of those designed products really have control over the user experience since they cannot know what other products they have to play well with.

The content shared here is trying to explore what UX Design might really mean – is it even possible?

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Opinions

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The Compelling Touchscreen – who benefits?

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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Unfocus Groups

Using the ideas of participatory design workshops, combined with IDEO's focus on the more extreme and less typical users, Unfocus Groups bring people together to express their needs through construction and participation rather than through words.

Examples

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GE Digital Power
GE Digital Power
In creating digital HMI for a power plant, it is easy to find constraints pulling in different directions – towards simplification of the HMI and the use of fewer, smaller screens, versus the presentation of more data across more, larger screens. Either is a possible experience that can be designed for, but the whole team needs to know which experience they are aiming for.
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Harmony Design Culture
Harmony Design Culture
As well as the usual processes of research and design, the team at Harmony developed a set of rules in which all the team were required to have regular customer encounters – from senior leadership down to junior engineers.
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Fallen Leaves
Fallen Leaves
The Fallen Leaves installation at the Holocaust Museum in Berlin provides some good examples for thinking about experience design. Of particular note is the fact that there is a small note as you walk down the corridor towards the exhibit which says “The artists requests that you walk upon the exhibit.”
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Harmony Remotes
Harmony Remotes
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Evenflo Stroller
Evenflo Stroller
Winner of the HFES Kaplan Human-Centered Product Design Award (early 2000’s) this stroller had numerous patentable innovations and was extremely popular with those who bought one (judging by Amazon reviews and reviews elsewhere).
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GE Activepoint
GE Activepoint
What happens when you change from a GUI-element that directly controls a physical part of the industrial system to an industrial internet, digital manipulation that the system itself understands and can adjust? What happens when your industrial plant has some intelligence about what it is meant to be doing?
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