There’s an interview over at the EE Times web site that made me take notice. The interview is with a Stanford engineering professor, and you wouldn’t think that it would relate to web design. It does.
In the interview, the professor discusses a change in design methodology from “design” to “design thinking.” It seems like just semantics, but the professor discusses a fundamental shift from simply designing in a vacuum to taking a more human-centered approach.
What exactly is human-centered design in its most practical form?
“One of our teams went out with firefighters. They recognized that one of their biggest problems was not just the range of their radios, but scoping out information about a burning building. The team came back with ideas for sensor mesh networks, so a firefighter could effectively throw a bunch of marbles into an environment and they would report back the heat and other factors.
To do that kind of work, you need to follow the firefighters from the moment they come to the station to their trip to the emergency site and back. You look at the whole life cycle of the experience and anywhere along the way you might find an insight that would drive your design.”
This philosophy has been in practice in the web design field for years now. Web usability experts have been teaching and preaching this for years, and many of the best web designers already embrace this philosophy. Most companies (clients), on the other hand, aren’t there yet, and therein lies the challenge to both web designers and companies wanting better results from the web. While web customer research may drive project costs up, the return on a company’s investment comes when they see better results from their web site than they would have otherwise seen. In addition, since user research informed the design of a optimally usable web site, companies don’t need to incur the cost to fix usability problems with their site after the new site is live.
Consider this when you’re starting your next design project. Weigh the benefits of doing it right the first time versus the cost of user research.
