The other day, I watched a young woman give a short presentation of her work. She demonstrated a great breadth and depth of design research ability, particularly in one project, a business-facing customer service iPad app. Par for the course, she researched the hell out of the job and the needs of both the employees and the customers, but still she didn’t really have enough information to support a product she was happy with. So, she revealed, she decided to act on the cardinal sin of design research: she designed for herself! She leaned on her own experience as a customer service representative to actually understand what the hell was going on. It’s a shame her work was under NDA, but from what she was able to tell us it’s probably really, really good.
I have a lot of gripes with the design world, one of the biggest being the emphasis on process. Process, process, process. I’m passionate about process. What’s your process? My process is iterative. Sometimes I want to find a way to reanimate George Carlin and tell him to spend some time listening to some of these people in design and he’ll have skit ideas for years.
But it’s not just the zeal with which people talk (and teach others to talk) about it; it’s that this idea of process is actually a very narrow idea, no matter how much people talk about how much freedom we have to create our own processes. The encapsulation of “design thinking” is probably the worst offender of the idea that user research should in no way involve the designer’s own experiences.
The idea that a designer can’t make informed choices based on her own experiences—that design by the seat of your pants is off limits—is a gigantic waste of the biggest and most useful design research opportunity there is: our daily lives. True empathy can’t be taught; it’s going through things ourselves and watching others go through things and being able to relate, to analyze a situation and understand at a fundamental level what’s going right and wrong and what’s happening emotionally, and taking those emotions internally in a search for solutions and improvements.
That’s not really a process you can prescribe, which is probably why it’s been tossed out as a valid way to work. It can’t be packaged and sold to build a competency en masse, whether in society or an individual company. It’s a real shame because we’re tossing out an enormity of insights into the human experience and limiting not only the potential for better creations, but also the ability for more people to actually understand what good design is about and be included in working toward it.