Culture Clash Issue #285 - Beyond the limits of User Centered Design
Thinking of the whole ecosystem and applying systems thinking
Welcome to the first issue of the new 2021 Culture Clash. ⚡️ I’m Oz Lubling.
Culture Clash curates the best product design, product management, and apps content. For 2021, I want to focus the newsletter and make it even more valuable for you. Moving forward, each week’s issue will focus on one topic in the field of product design. I will be providing you my insights and unique perspective on the topic. I will continue to include curated links but focus on 5 essential links for the week. The goal is to make sure I’m giving you the highest quality signal possible. This focused approach will lead to a better and more valuable experience.
If you have thoughts or feedback, feel free to leave a comment below to reach out to me via email. I love hearing from you. Now to this week’s topic.
Beyond User Centered Design
Over the holidays, I read the inspiration post “Camera Obscura: Beyond the lens of user-centered design” by Alexis Lloyd, Devin Mancuso, Diana Sonis, and Lis Hubert. This post blew my mind and I wanted to bring it to your attention. If you work in UX, Product, or Product Design, this is an important read.
Over the past decade or so, User Centered Design (UCD) has become the primary approach for designing successful consumer products. For clarity, here’s a definition of UCD from Interaction Design Foundation:
User-centered design (UCD) is an iterative design process in which designers focus on the users and their needs in each phase of the design process. In UCD, design teams involve users throughout the design process via a variety of research and design techniques, to create highly usable and accessible products for them.
UCD originally came about as a response to products being designed primarily on the basis of business needs. Before UCD became the primary design approached, digital products often lacked empathy or understanding of their users. This resulted in products that were difficult to use, unintuitive, and often not very successful. UCD was brought into the product development process to address these very challenges. By putting the user at the center of the design process, designers were able to create intuitive, empathetic, and successful consumer products that users loved.
I’ve been working from the user-centered approach for the past decade in both user experience and product roles. I’m a big believer in designing products based on user needs and goals. When first reading this post, I was a bit taken aback by the idea that there may be deep flaws in this methodology. In all honestly, It something I hadn’t quite considered before.
All design methodologies have blind spots. UCD is no exception. The article does a great job at enumerating these blind spots. For example, when focused on the user needs, we often miss the needs and experience of other participants in the system. In addition, the relentless focus on removing friction for the user often happens at a cost for other participants in the system.
A great example of these user centered tensions is the ride-hailing experience of Uber / Lyft. The whole point of the experience is to make it easy and convenient for the user to get a ride quickly by pressing one button. The user’s payment credentials are already in the app. Often their favorite destinations are already saved in the app. All of these features are intentionally designed with the purpose of removing friction. That’s what makes this user experience so magical.
What happens on the other end of that experience is something the user is often not directly aware of. How are these design choices impacting other actors within the ecosystem? Drivers have to circle around key areas of the city to ensure there’s enough supply of quick rides. These drivers affect traffic in the neighborhood for all other drivers. The circling and idling vehicles create more pollution around the neighborhood. This pollution impacts members of the community and neighborhood businesses whether they use these ride-hailing services or not.
The article proposes that we expand our design considerations beyond just the user. Instead, when designing far-reaching user experiences, let’s consider the entire ecosystem of actors/participants each with their own agenda and circumstance. We can do this by augmenting our UCD approach with systems thinking.
Systems thinking is intended to help us see how many complex elements interact; to understand a diversity of participants and the structures that connect them. By bringing these two practices together, we can provide ourselves with a robust toolkit that is appropriate to the complexity and scale of the challenges we face as designers today.
The article goes much further into how to apply systems thinking and incorporate it into our design process. I encourage you to read about proposed approaches and consider applying them to the products you’re working on.
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5 links
✍🏻 Designing for Patients and Clinicians: Expanding The Human in Human Centered Design (HCD)
This article has a direct connection to my UCD write up above. It presents an example in the healthcare space where design challenges can feel insurmountable. Consider how to designing for the various actors within healthcare (patients, doctors, etc), while working within the larger ecosystem of technological constraints and legacy systems.
Why use another browser on iOS? There are already so many available including Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Brave, etc. Well, Command Browser offers a few features that make it worth considering. The tab organization system is super visual, easy to use, and useful if you’re a heavy tab user on iOS. But the killer feature is the ability to highlight text on any webpage. Go to any webpage and then begin highlighting your favorite passages. You can then sync your highlights automatically to Notion or Readwise. This feature makes this browser an amazing tool for research.
📱 Medito: Meditation and Wellness
Medito is a nonprofit foundation with a mission of building a more mindful world. They’re also building a very comprehensive meditation app that is totally free. This app has courses, challenges, daily meditations, meditations for every topic imaginable, etc. If you’re looking to get started with meditation, this is a fantastic app to start with. it even has mantra meditation which tends to be difficult to find in an app. highly recommended.
This website has an incredible collection of fantasy UI from various movies and TV shows. Many product designers draw inspiration from movies and TV sci-fi interfaces. Bookmark this incredible resource.
✍🏻 Scarred by 2020: Gen Z looks for a Covid-Free Future
A moving article showing you a global perspective on the pandemic through the eyes of various Gen Zers around the world. Don’t get stuck on the fact that it’s the Gen Z perspective. This article is an important read.
I like this new focused approach to the newsletter. Feels easier to have a discussion around the main thread. Two things I notice about the UCD post:
1. I'm all for pointing out blind spots in methodologies, as the post does, but I think the larger lesson is that methodologies provide guiding principles, they are not dogma. For instance, there are definitely well designed experiences that deliberately introduce friction for reasons that improve (even bring joy to) the user's experience. "Removing all friction for the user" feels this way.
2. Something that isn't discussed is what the criteria is for evaluation and prioritization amongst the needs of the various stakeholders. Who gets to decide at Uber how to prioritize between user friction, ride efficiency, and local pollution? To my mind, this is a moral question that designers are constantly engaged in, how to decide amongst competing values. Since Uber is a business, and users are paying customers, the criteria by default is usually just maximizing profit. But if we want to expand towards other considerations, we should discuss new criteria of evaluation for designers to navigate these decisions.
While I appreciate Systems Design Thinking, I think its disingenuous to blame an organization's principals on any design system. I also think it is incredibly dangerous to open an article with a statement about systemic police racism and then spend the rest of the article talking about the flaws in UCD. Was UCD used to design police systems? Doubtful.
That said, I like the 5 approaches they end it off with. Hilary Mason first introduced me to the exercise of thinking about how the technologies we were proposing could be used for evil. We would have brainstorming sessions just around that. Very valuable.
I think a lot of the issues they discuss are organizational issues, not design issues. If your organization practices Triple Bottom Line, then you are already taking these issue into account. I think user first and UCD approaches will also lead to helping solve the world's greatest challenges, starting with Climate Change.