A few months back Fast Company’s Co.Design blog published a controversial post that triggered a lot of discussion. In their article provocatively titled User-Led Innovation Can’t Create Breakthroughs; Just Ask Apple and Ikea, Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen wrote:
“[User-centered design] doesn’t work. Here’s the truth: Great brands lead users, not the other way around.”
Skibsted and Hansen cited Apple and IKEA as some of the most innovative brands that don’t follow the user-centric design model. They say that their friends in the Apple design team spoke out against user-centric design because it’s “a waste of time”, and similarly at IKEA because “it doesn’t work.” They argued that brands have to take the lead in innovation with a strong and consistent vision, and outlined several reasons why it’s actually detrimental to listen to your users.
I have to admit, their examples are compelling, but are they correct? How do we reconcile their claims with what we know about the value of design research and user-centered design?
What is innovation anyway?
Let’s first define what we mean when we say innovation. If we go by the textbook definition, innovation in short is a renewal or improvement on something—e.g. a process, system or product—that changes the way people make decisions and do things, outside their norm. In other words, it has to be something new and useful enough for people to adopt en masse, otherwise it’s just another useless invention. Most often, these innovations are small and incremental: cars keep getting faster and more fuel efficient; TVs keep getting bigger and thinner; iPads keep getting faster and sexier—you get the idea. But sometimes they can be radical and lead to revolutionary breakthroughs: automobiles replacing horse-drawn buggies as the primary mode of transportation; televisions replacing radios as the dominant home entertainment medium; iPads replacing netbooks as the best-selling ultra-portable computing device.
So what does this all mean?
Let’s go back to the original question. Can UCD lead to breakthroughs? I want to make the claim that in most cases the short answer is no—that UCD alone is not enough. In a nutshell, UCD is about listening to the users, analyzing their problem, and providing solutions that meet their needs. These methodologies can often lead to incremental innovations—that is, incrementally improving and optimizing pre-existing solutions. But what about radical innovation? I think the answer lies in how the pioneers of innovation did it in the past.
A catalyst for innovation
Let’s take a look at Henry Ford for example. He is famously quoted to have said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses!” However, what most people forget is that Ford was an engineer and an experimental hobbyist. He was experimenting with gasoline engines that he eventually put on four bicycle wheels. He called it the Ford Quadricycle and it predated the first Model T by about 12 years. Nobody knew what a “car” was, let alone find any use for it.
Here’s what I’m trying to get at: the man responsible for one of the greatest innovations of our time had, what I would like to call, a tinkerers’ personality. Someone who was always curious and loved working on things. And it wasn’t just Ford; Thomas Edison, while working on improving the telegraph transmitter, heard noises coming from the paper tape that resembled spoken words. He had a hunch that telephone messages could be recorded in a similar way and, after a lot of tinkering, eventually created the phonograph. I believe this tinkerers’ personality is common among the world’s greatest innovators and was a catalyst for a lot of the radical innovations of the past.
Finding the balance
Adam Richardson, Strategy Director for Marketing at Frog Design, sums up the challenge of innovation this way:
“[ … ] the pendulum has swung so much toward doing user research that we (as a profession) risk losing the magic that comes from conceptual thinking. The seductiveness of evidence and insight that comes from design research can push inspiration, intuition, hypotheses, hunches and non-linear thinking to the sidelines. Analysis overwhelms creativity.”
I’m inclined to agree with this sentiment. I surmise that the pioneers of innovation really did have inspiration, intuition, hypotheses, hunches and non-linear thinking on their side. These are traits I would consider a part of a tinkerers’ personality.
In a recent article Don Norman, one of the pioneers of the UX field, points out that it’s sometimes good to act first, and do the research later. In our search for innovation, it is dangerous to swing the pendulum too far in any one direction. Too far towards research and we get overly deterministic, stifling design; too far towards experimentation and we get arbitrary and open-ended design. If we can strike a balance between creating opportunities that foster tinkerers and deploying the proven processes of UCD in everything that we do, I believe we are at least on the right path to doing more and more innovative work.
written by Peter Hui
Great article…
Don Norman’s idea of acting first and research later is bang on. As an industrial designer I sometimes wonder if making things too easy or super dumb downed isn’t actually helping humans become better. It’s like we allow people to remain uncurious and we just serve things on a platter. I do a lot of tech support for the websites I’ve designed for clients and I find the term of “intuitive” is losing it’s meaning. Users are expecting everything to be super easy and not put any work into seeing things if they actually paid attention and read instructions. I find I’ve succeeded if the user on the other end of the phone says “ooooohhhhhh, that’s how you do it. If they figure it out eventually and slap their foreheads they realize everything was in front of them but they didn’t bother reading a bit of text. I do the same thing from time to time. I don’t ignore these users though. They teach me quite a bit, but it’s sometimes difficult to design every percentile in the book.
33%: I get what you’re saying, and I don’t think we necessarily have to choose between designing something that’s too simple or too complex. Assuming we’ve done the research, we should always try to concentrate on a core set of functionality and make the interactions for that super simple. Of course, the reality is that nothing’s ever that simple. I think using progressive disclosure (as described by Jakob Nielson) is a good way of getting something super simple up front while still enabling the so-called “power users” so they get that “ohhh” moment.
Peter, interesting article. I do believe research is important for sparking insight in the design process, and can create incremental improvements to existing design solutions. With that in mind innovation comes from having the awareness (or coconuts) to ask ‘what can be next?’.
So, Peter to the question you pose “Can UCD lead to breakthroughs?”
I’m a big proponent for understanding psychology and social processes to help stimulate ideas incubated. My thoughts are that UCD can help guide and spark ideas by zeroing in on the pain points outside of the design that’s causing it. So my answer is “It depends”. It depends how sweeping we are in our research. How open are we in looking outside the existing common sphere for explorative discovery.
Its ultimately about the individuals who react and respond to a particular circumstance, and not the process that put them there. Instinct, intuition, charm, balls, will, drive, curiosity (etc) are traits of an individual, and not really part of a process.
I love this article, and the one it discusses. I think the user-centred attitude stretches as far as the age-old argument of having content [excuse my French] ‘above the fold’. Which I think, in this day, is ridiculous.
I often find myself developing sites that feel too cluttered and disorganised, ironically, for the sake of being a little easier to use. I think that the Apple and IKEA models work particularly well, not just because they’re different, but because they have enough of an ‘alternative’ approach to cause interest, yet retain some familiarities in order to prevent alienating people.
This article has certainly helped me to bring reason to a few thoughts about user-design I’ve had for a while. Great job.
Inevitably you’ll always need to strike a balance between blue sky thinking and user-centred testing and design. My opinion is you can start with either to get to that end goal. From time to time there are moments of brilliance, in which case user testing is likely to take the form of simply refining that original concept.
At the opposite end of the scale, user testing can also be used as the catalyst, effectively becoming a brainstorming session. I often find the less you give a tester to look at, the more questions they’ll ask – and the more questions they ask the more ideas they generate in our heads that we can then use to come up with those innovative, revolutionary ideas.
You need the tinkerers to find the cool inventions and then the UCD folk to use it to create products that people want to buy. There should always be freedom to be innovative.
I’m a user centred design advocate, possibly evangelist, and agree mostly with this article. There is a term I use probably too much, which is a ‘solution looking for a problem’. This is a term used frequently in negative connotations, yet is the basis of much innovation in technology. Follow a user centred design process and ask people to imagine how technology would help them do things in the future and they’ll very likely come up with either no ideas (at best) or an ill-conceived vision (at worst). Apart from a handful, most people are not innovative. So innovations in technology need to lead people and not the other way around.
However innovation in technology still requires a strong user-focus. An understanding of people and the way people like to do things. An understanding of what they do. Understanding their pain points. This is all user centred ‘intelligence’.
Whether innovating something completely novel, or making major design changes to something that already exists, involves paving the way for a dramatic departure from current thinking. The user centred design process simply doesn’t accommodate this, is its focus is on fine tuning what’s already there, which itself stifles creativity.
An open canvas approach with a team that is innovative and prepared to take the risk of their concept completely flopping, is a good balance. But I would argue that successful innovations are based on a really good understanding of who their designs might be targeting, and detailed knowledge of those people.
In the example, Apple and Ikea were cited. These are two very different companies in terms of what they do. But their common focus is innovation on one hand, and an extremely close tie to their audience / customers on the other. Both innovate products which are unlike any others and seem to address needs which people didn’t know they had, but in a very positive way. If this happened without any kind of user-centred design, then they would be playing more of a design lottery. It’s their strong attachment to people (and therefore user-centred approach) that makes both brands successful in my opinion. But neither uses people explicitly as part of their design innovation.