History and Nature of User-Centred Design
It has emerged as a ubiquitous approach in the development of contemporary products and services, yet a variety of definitions exist. This article attempts to define User-Centred Design through an assessment of its methods, history, and value.
This article’s title is misleading. There is no one nature of User-Centred Design as it is shaped by the context of its application. For a User-Interface Designer, the focus is on the relationship between user and machine, whereas a more holistic approach is pursed in User-Experience Design. Human-Centred Design or Design Thinking approaches, tend to emphasise ethical or social considerations, while Product Design is concerned with economics and Service Design with the structure of touchpoints between a user and service. To acknowledge this fluctuation, the following section presents a definition of its general manifestations.
Definition of User-Centred Design
In applications of User-Centred Design, practitioners tend to converge around methods that involve establishing empathy with the user through iterative research, analysis and verification of their needs, and even direct collaboration. Their aim is to inform design decisions that successfully decrease the friction of use and improve the usability of a product or service, as well as the user’s experience with it.
The understanding of the user ‘constrains, defines or enables’¹ design considerations over what is designed. The user is described to be obvious in its meaning, as it is ‘the person who is using a system’.² However, the concept of the user can arguably be defined as a reference to ‘imagined, implicated, potential or real people’¹ who are anticipated to use a product or service. Professor of co-design Sampsa Hyysalo and information technologist Mikael Johnson argue that the user is a ‘relational term’¹ linked to a curated set of characteristics of the person envisioned to use a product or service. Consequently, designers can have different understandings of a user, some being more specific or elaborate than others. In order to establish such understanding, designers generally conduct multidisciplinary or user involving activities and iterations of design and its evaluation,³ resulting in visual or descriptive representations of users, such as Personas, and use-scenarios, for instance in User Journeys.
This figure illustrates the general User-Centred Design process. The process begins with a ‘careful study’⁴ of people’s behaviours, intentions, needs, and attitudes. For that, designers undertake ‘a diverse mix’⁴ of quantitative and qualitative research on their envisioned users and apply techniques such as surveys, interviews, observations or immersions. After a period of analysis and synthesis of the research findings, practitioners initiate the ideation process. Collaboration with multidisciplinary teams provides knowledge about ‘the context of use’⁵, but is also crucial to identifying the design’s technological feasibility and economic restrictions. Furthermore, collaboration with the users themselves helps designers to ‘better understand their practice, needs, and preferences’.⁶ Usually, a prototype is developed and tested to evaluate the ‘design assumptions’⁵ on use and user. Before the design is implemented, it is common practice to execute several iterations of the User-Centred Design process. Each iteration incorporates insights and research from previous attempts to improve and refine the product or service.
Origins and Development of User-Centred Design
The origin of today’s user as a central focus of the design process is commonly attributed to Donald Norman. Coining the term, Norman self-selected his job title at Apple as ‘User Experience Architect’ in 1993 because he wanted ‘to cover all aspects of the user’s experience with a system’.⁷ Quite ironically, Norman is one of the most prominent critics of its current ubiquity. He argues the term is accepted by designers without closer examination⁸ and is used almost arbitrarily due to lack of historical understanding of its development⁷.
Nonetheless, there is a rich history to the advancement of the user. Architects Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley locate the beginning of the ‘canonic Western image of the human at the center of design’⁹ in Leonardo DaVinci’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man, which they argue is the foundation to a series of successors in design and architecture.
A prominent example of this was industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss’ depiction of ‘Joe and Josephine’. By extracting statistical data from the military and fashion industry, Dreyfuss created median anatomical representations of mid-20th century American male and female bodies to improve the ergonomic use of everything ‘from interiors to dinnerware’. Dreyfuss argued that designers needed to consider the use of an object by people.¹⁰ Any friction between the product and people would prove a design has failed, while whenever ‘people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase — or just plain happier’ a design had succeeded.¹⁰
However, the simple and anatomical characterisations of Joe and Josephine are prime examples of what Colomina and Wigley refer to as a ‘disciplining of the body’, the act of replacing human diversity with one single frictionless silhouette:
‘The very things seen to be all too human — psychology, voice, face, expression, breathing, temperature, rhythm, asymmetry, sweat, porosity, breathing, fluctuations, awkwardness — disappear in favor of a single confident line marking the exterior limit of the human.’ ⁹
Physical representations of the user became outdated when they failed to capture the needs of increasingly sophisticated computer technology. This resulted in an increased focus on behavioural qualities such as the intentions, needs, and attitudes of the people using the product or service, and can be considered a definitive step towards the development of contemporary User-Centred Design approaches.
However, designer Liam Bannon and engineers Susanne Bødker and Jeffrey Bardzell highlight that when products first evolved to computers, power and agency in the professional sector became increasingly unbalanced due to an emergent white-collar bias that determined how computers were used, understood and taught.¹¹ To guard against newly appearing power imbalances a tradition known as Participatory Design evolved. Emboldened by the election of Social Democratic Parties in Scandinavia in the 1970s, workers and their trade unions established participatory methods to directly shape the development of information technology. As a result, products designed with methodologies involving their assigned users were not only more accessible but appeared to acquire higher approval of their diverse stakeholders.¹¹ The focus on power-rebalancing participation, as opposed to ‘depoliticized’¹¹ collaboration or representation marked the beginning of a movement aimed at improving the usability and understandability of poorly designed software by promoting the needs and abilities of those using it. Therefore, the influence of participatory design on contemporary user-centred methods is most prominently identified in the attempt to develop empathy with the user.
When personal computers entered offices in the USA in the 1980s, it soon became clear that their applications had to provide usable software that was then popularly characterised as user friendly.¹² Designs failing to be approved and adopted by the user started to be considered insufficiently informed about people, their capacities, needs and desires.¹³ Head of research at the Umeå Institute of Design Johan Redström highlights that the problems of failing designs have generated a set of ideas concerning the user in design:
‘First, that these problems can be avoided through optimisation of fit between object and user; second, that design can, or even needs to be based on knowledge about users, their capacities, abilities and desires’.¹³
Consequently, it became more important to work for, and with, users. Prototyping tools evolved for the first time, revolutionising the design and development process by enabling designers to quickly test, iterate and ensure the usability of designs before fully investing in the development of a product.¹² Later, when computers started to appear in domestic, social, and leisure contexts, ‘the focus expanded beyond usability and efficiency’.¹⁴ Designers were required to revisit their methods and focus on ‘the holistic experience of use’.¹⁴ This change led to companies using the term ‘User Experience’ as a key differentiator in the mid-90s.
Yet, as PayPal’s Lead Content Strategist Adam Lefton points out, the term User-Experience Design only began its rise to industry-standard ubiquity in 2009. In support a Google Trends analysis comparing a similar history of ‘UX design’ to ‘interface design’, trending into what today is considered an ‘instinctive process’ that places user activity at the centre of all design stages.
Thus, the interest in designing experiences can be considered an ‘effort to expand the design space’¹⁵ accrediting it with a more holistic impact. More specifically, professor of Human-Computer Interaction Jodi Forlizzi and professor of Artificial Intelligence John Zimmerman argue, that it created recent opportunities for designers to contribute to the solutions for ‘societal level problems’¹⁴, ranging from homelessness to health to urban development and policy making.
The Value of User-Centred Design
Some of the international design community attribute the expansion of the design space to the value of User-Centred Design. An often-reused example (see title picture) shows an unused constructed pavement crossed by a pedestrian footpath to highlight how a designer’s untested assumptions of a solution can diverge from the addressed user’s true needs.
Failed software design has also proven to produce large scale societal consequences. The poorly designed software interface used by the Hawaiian Emergency Management Agency misled an employee to send instead of test a ballistic missile alert forcing Hawaii into panic mode in January 2018. This example highlights the importance of conducting usability tests to ensure interfaces are both simple and understandable.
A third example refers to the 2000 American presidential election in which Al Gore’s loss against George W. Bush can be traced back to the misleading usability of Florida’s butterfly ballot papers.¹⁶ Many voters had accidentally voted in favour of Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore due to the unclear order of punch holes and according electors, resulting in Al Gore’s scarce defeat in swing state Florida and therefore the election as a whole. This figure shows the official ballot for the 2000 United States Presidential election from Palm Beach County, Florida.
Although this example’s intention is likewise to highlight the urgency to test for usability and comprehension, the scale of the failed design is unmatched — as the course of human history could have been a different one.
However, the development of an expanding design space succeeded because, as Modular Robotics’ CEO and Design Director Eric Schweikardt argues, User-Centred Design proved able to answer questions of convenience and comfort as well as of efficiency and cost.¹⁷ At the time Phillips Design’s Senior Director of Trends and Strategy Josephine Green reasoned that optimising for convenience and comfort is relevant to design as the user perceives their life to be increasingly more complicated and therefore rejects anything that adds complexity.¹⁸ As a result, they are more likely to use or consume corresponding products or services.
Consequently, entrepreneurial success is measured by activity and revenue per user, and in recent months the methods of User-Centred Design have prominently proven as valuable for business prosperity today¹⁹ and are expected to be in the future²⁰. International consultancy firm McKinsey recently reported User-Centred Design to be a key factor of achieving ‘disruptive and sustained commercial success in physical, service, and digital settings’.¹⁹ They argue that ‘superior business performance’ throughout diverse industries, measured by annual growth and total returns to shareholders, are strongly correlated to the pursuit of User-Centred Design methods.¹⁹ This has consequently created opportunities for designers to seize managerial positions in large corporations. Similarly, the UX Collective reports that designers increasing revenue or reducing cost by applying User-Centred Design are being rewarded with a say in strategic decisions in business development.
Lastly, the City of Cologne’s organisational developer Elisabeth Fried observed an international growing interest and application of User-Centred Design methods in the public sector in order to transform public administration and digital services, as well as policy-making. Fried argues that the focus on the user enables designers in the public sector to identify the real problem and to facilitate and moderate transformative processes.²¹
Together, the ubiquitous business interest and the industry’s illustrations exemplify the scope of the application of User-Centred Design but also highlight its political responsibility. Despite the general interest in leveraging User-Centred Design into large-scale social challenges, the the scale and speed in which it continues to be applied raises questions about its suitability.
Read more about how User-Centred Design is replicating and reinforcing biases, neglecting long-term needs, obscuring systemic responsibilities, and over-determining use.
¹ Hyysalo, S. & Johnson, M., 2015. The user as relational entity. Information Technology & People, 28(1), pp. 72-89.
² Bardzell, J., 2016. The User Reconfigured – On Subjectivities of Information. Interactions, XXIII(2), pp. 40-43.
³ Mao, J.-Y., Vredenburg, K., Smith, P. W. & Carey, T., 2005. The State of User-Centered Design Practice. Communications of the ACM, 48(3), pp. 105-109.
⁴ Rothstein, P. & Tornello Shirey, M., 2006. User-Centered Research: A Status Report. Design Philosophy Papers, 2(1), pp. 7-19.
⁵ de Ruyter, B., 2003. User-Centred Design. In: E. Aarts & S. Marzano, eds. The New Everyday: Views on Ambient Intelligence. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, pp. 42-45.
⁶ Steen, M., 2012. Human-Centered Design as a Fragile Encounter. Design Issues, 28(1), pp. 72-80.
⁷ Norman, D. A., 2007. Peter in Conversation with Don Norman About UX & Innovation [Interview] (13 December 2007).
⁸ Norman, D. A., 2005. Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful. Interactions, XII(4), pp. 14-19.
⁹ Colomina, B. & Wigley, M., 2018. are we human? notes on an archaeology of design. Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers.
¹⁰ Dreyfuss, H., 1995. Designing for People. 1st ed. New York: Simon and Schuster.
¹¹ Bannon, L., Bardzell, J. & Bødker, S., 2019. Reimagining Participatory Design. Interactions, 26(1), pp. 26-32.
¹² Kolko, J., 2018. The Divisiveness of Design Thinking. Interactions, XXV(3), pp. 29-34.
¹³ Redström, J., 2006. Towards user design? On the shift from object to user as the subject of design. Design Studies, 27(2), pp. 123-139.
¹⁴ Forlizzi, J. & Zimmerman, J., 2013. Promoting Service Design as a Core Practice in Interaction Design. Tokyo, 5th IASDR World Conference on Design Research.
¹⁵ Redström, J., 2006. Towards user design? On the shift from object to user as the subject of design. Design Studies, 27(2), pp. 123-139.
¹⁶ Wand, J. N. et al., 2001. The Butterfly Did It: The Aberrant Vote for Buchanan in Palm Beach County, Florida. American Political Science Review, 95(4), pp. 793-810.
¹⁷ Schweikardt, E., 2009. User Centered Is Off Center. Interactions, XVI(3), pp. 12-15.
¹⁸ Green, J., 2003. Thinking the Future. In: E. Arts & S. Marzano, eds. The New Everyday: Views on Ambient Intelligence. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, pp. 22-27.
¹⁹ Sheppard, B., Kouyoumjian, G., Sarrazin, H. & Dore, F., 2018. The Business Value of Design, Seattle: McKinsey Quarterly.
²⁰ Kirchherr, J., Klier, J. & Lehmann-Brauns, C. W. M., 2018. Future Skills: Welche Kompetenzen in Deutschland fehlen, Essen: Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft e.V.
²¹ Fried, E., 2019. Design im öffentlichen Sektor?. In: B. Mager, S. Wibbeke & F. Bruschi, eds. reine formsache: Innovation im öffentlichen Sektor. Köln: Köln International School of Design, Technische Hochschule Köln, pp. 30-35.
