Winter Is Coming: Similarities Between User-Centered Design and Game of Thrones
OK, I will admit it — I miss Game of Thrones. I miss Danaerys’s longing for a new and better world. I miss Tyrion striving to not only survive but overcome obstacles to rise up and champion the voices of the people and I especially miss John Snow who, with great humility, was a leader without power or pomp. He just wanted to do the right thing. When Danaerys makes the statement “I don’t want to stop the wheel, I want to break the wheel” she spoke with such hope and such conviction. Ahhh, what aspiration.
But in my nostalgia for these characters, I realized that there are parallels between these characters (OK, stay with me here) and the essence of user-centered-design. Most teams I have worked within the last 30 years have had equal aspirations. At Apple, we wanted to “think different.” Teams I have worked with, almost all of them over the years, when launching a new product design, talk about “delighting our customers,” “creating the best user experience” and “making it more user-friendly.” But just how do we do that? How do we break the wheel?
The first thing that comes to mind is that these are the same kinds of questions addressed by the principles first brought forth by Don Norman in 1986 when he published his book User Centered System Design and introduced user-centered design as a repeatable process. Then a few years later, in 1988, he published The Design of Every Day Things, which is still a book I tell everyone who calls themselves a UXer (researcher, designer, strategist) or a product manager to read (the updates he has made over the years make it very very relevant). In this book, Dr. Norman describes the psychology behind “good” or “bad” designs, giving examples of design in our everyday lives, like how the switch works to turn on a light or whether to push, pull, or slide a door.
There is a lot in this book that is important to product design and continues to offer a solid foundation to the UX community. There are terms in this book that are important and that every UXer should be able to speak to. Terms like:
- Affordance
- Signifier
- Mapping
- Feedback
- Constraints and norms
- Conceptual Models
- Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective levels of cognition
I was going to do a summary of the book’s key points, but here is a better summary in this article by Lim Zhiyang. So please check it out. Learn how to break the wheel.
You know we have come a long way since Don Norman wrote his book in 1986. We can do remote research and remote ideation today thanks to online meetings and high-speed internet. But we are still trying to break the wheel — we are still trying to create products that delight the users, that match the cognitive model of the target user groups, that take the user’s interpretation of the task and build the design around that. So we keep playing our own version of the Game of Thrones. We watch users in order to understand the problem, we ideate based on what we learn, we build prototypes, and we test. Then we do it again. It is a great process and it has stood the test of time.
Keep on applying these user-centered-design principles. Winter is coming.
