Friday, September 23, 2005

Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful

Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful

(The debate has come full circle already??)


We find that work in the kitchen does not consist of independent, separate acts, but of a series of inter-related processes.
(Christine Frederick, The Labor-Saving Kitchen. 1919.)

The methods of HCD seem centered around static understanding of each set of controls, each screen on an electronic display. But as a result, the sequential operations of activities are often ill-supported. The importance of support for sequences has long been known ever since the time-and-motion studies of the early 1900s, as the quotation from Frederick, above, illustrates. Simply delete the phrase “in the kitchen” and her words are still a powerful prescription for design. She was writing in 1919: what has happened in the past 100 years to make us forget this?
Human-Centered Design has become such a dominant theme in design that it is now accepted by interface and application designers automatically, without thought, let alone criticism. That’s a dangerous state — when things are treated as accepted wisdom. The purpose of this essay is to provoke thought, discussion, and reconsideration of some of the fundamental principles of Human-Centered Design. These principles, I suggest, can be helpful, misleading, or wrong. At times, they might even be harmful. Activity-Centered Design is superior.
KNOW YOUR USER

If there is any principle that is sacred to those in the field of user-interface design and human-computer interaction, it is “know your user.” After all, how can one design something for people without a deep, detailed knowledge of those people? The plethora of bad designs in the world would seem to be excellent demonstrations of the perils of ignoring the people for whom the design is intended. Human-Centered Design was developed to overcome the poor design of software products. By emphasizing the needs and abilities of those who were to use the software, usability and understandability of products has indeed been improved. But despite these improvements, software complexity is still with us. Even companies that pride themselves on following human-centered principles still have complex, confusing products.

If it is so critical to understand the particular users of a product, then what happens when a product is designed to be used by almost anyone in the world? There are many designs that do work well for everyone. This is paradoxical, and it is this very paradox that led me to re-examine common dogma.

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