- The secret to success is to understand what the real problem is. It is easy to see only the surface problems and never dig deeper to address the real issues.
- Design is not marketing. Design concerns what people need and use. Marketing concerns what people will buy.
- Design is usually qualitative. Marketing is quantitative.
- Note that numerical correlations say nothing of people’s needs.
- See also the trade-offs page. Both are needed. Design specifications need to include buying and using a product.
Design Pipeline
- Design is an iterative and expansive process. Start from first principles—the real problem that needs solving.
- Human Centered Design is the process of ensuring that people’s needs are met, that the resulting product is understandable, usable, and pleasing to use. It emphasizes
- Solving the right problem and
- Finding the right solution accounting for human needs and capabilities.
- The Double Diamond design process is based on what HCD emphasizes.
- It has four stages: Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver
- In the process of the double diamond, encourage free exploration (divergence) but put constraints via a deadline and budget to encourage convergence.
Human Centered Design
- HCD has four activities (repeated in a cycle)
- Observation
- Understand the nature of the problem itself and the users affected.
- Use Applied Ethnography. Observe target users in their natural environment, wherever the product or service being designed will actually be used.
- The goal is to determine human needs that can be addressed with new products.
- Ideation
- Prototyping
- Quickly build a prototype or mock up solution for testing.
- Settle for low fidelity prompts so that we don’t have to commit too much to producing them.
- The Wizard of Oz Technique, mimic a complex system’s functionalities through smoke and mirrors instead of actually making the system.
- Prototype to ensure the problem is well understood.
- Testing
- Using a small group of people representative of the target demographic, test the prototype.
- While the test is happening, observe how users are operating the prototype.
- When the test is over, understand the subject’s thought processes.
- Iteration
- It enables continual refinement. Fail Frequently, Fail Fast
- Failures in testing are learning experiences.
- Requirements are developed by watching people in their natural environment.
- With each iteration, the ideas become clearer as specifications become better defined, and prototypes better approximate the target.
- The process ends depending on external bureaucratic constraints (schedules and budget).
- Note that iterative design has its drawbacks when compared to linear design.
- If too much time is wasted on iterating, no product will be produced.
- Additionally, iteration incurs a cost in time and money.
- Iteration is best suited for specifications, and early design phases since it is not scalable.
- Linear design gives management better control, even if cumbersome.
- Combine the two methods. Delay specifications until iterative testing is done, but also keep a tight control of schedule.
Activity Centered Design
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HCD focuses on people. For products with near universal coverage, focus on activity centered design. Design for activities, and the result will be usable by everyone.
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Activities are collections of tasks performed towards a high level goal. A task is a cohesive set of operations directed towards a low-level goal.
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There are three kinds of goals
- Be-goals govern a person’s being, determine why they act, and are fundamental.
- Do goals determine plans and actions for an activity.
- Motor goals specify how actions are performed.
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In ACD, The activity defines the product and its structure.
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The conceptual model of the product is congruent to the conceptual model of the activity.
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This works since people’s activities across the world tend to be similar.
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Support the activities while being sensitive to human capabilities and people will accept the design and learn whatever is necessary.
Challenges in Design
Design Pipeline in Practice
- In practice, none of the above methods are followed perfectly due to business and engineering pressures.
- Don Norman’s Law of Product Development - The day a product development process starts, it is behind schedule and above budget.
- See the planning fallacy for something related to this.
- A proposed solution to this dissonance is to separate the design research from the product team, so that design researchers are always out on the field.
- Additionally, design teams should be multidisciplinary so that all participants understand the role of each discipline.
- Design should be flexible, accommodating a wide range of people.
The Design Challenge
- The fundamental principles of designing for people are the same across all domains.
- Design addresses constraints:
- Products have multiple conflicting requirements.
- The people buying the product are not always those who use it.
- In some situation cost dominates.
- It is also important to consider the people who will make the design a reality.
- Designs have to accommodate for special people and special cases. Sometimes it is impossible to build a product that accommodates everyone, so different versions are needed.
- Many products carry a stigma about people’s difficulties.
Standardization
- It is easy for smaller companies to standardize niche products. It is harder to standardize more universally used products.
- Politics and Economics affect standardization processes .
- Sometimes standard take so long to be established that by the time they do come into wide practice, they can be irrelevant.
Intentionally Bad Design
- Some things ought to be deliberately difficult to for safety, privacy, or security reasons.
- Even with intentionally bad design, the rules of good design because.
- Even deliberately difficult designs aren’t entirely difficult. Only one part is difficult.
- Knowledge on good design lends to knowledge on how to go about making bad designs.