User-centered design

The Homer
Originally uploaded by Bolmits Models

I recently had a discussion with someone about being cautious to letting users design the software. Without getting into the arguments about which design school is better and what kinds of user research is best, I wanted to briefly highlight the extremes of user design.

This image is from a Simpson's episode in which Homer is allowed to design a car. It has all the features that Homer wants and yet, as you can guess, turns out to be a huge failure.

Users, like automobile consumers, have lots of ideas of features that they want, activities that they want to do, tasks they need to accomplish, goals that they want to achieve and more.

However, when asking a user to design software, we are asking them to do our job. Our job (as designers) is to take the feature requests, tasks, goals, desires and everything else and synthesize this into a good design that will meet business priorities and the combination of needs/wants of all users.

Letting users design software directly could lead to "The Homer." While this might be hyperbole, the principle remains. Think of the great designs in your everyday life. While the designers very likely listened a great deal to customers and users, they likely weren't designed directly by users.

The alternative is to use methodologies like Cooper's Goal-directed design or other user-centered design processes (as much as you can call these processes). The idea is to let the designers ask the questions that they need answering and to "synthesize" the data into a good design. The results are usually pretty good and customers frequently respond well to the results.

This position on user-centered design is not the only view, just my view. Please, leave your opinions in the comments. I would love to see this discussed more.