Kathy Sierra recently posted the following helpful hint on Creating Passionate Users:
Seriously, though, she goes on to say:
Most of us realize that focus groups are notoriously ineffective for many things, but we still assume that listening to real feedback from real users is the best way to drive new products and services, as well as improve on what we have. But there’s a huge problem with that — people don’t necessarily know how to ask for something they’ve never conceived of! Most people make suggestions based entirely around incremental improvements, looking at what exists and thinking about how it could be better. But that’s quite different from having a vision for something profoundly new.
This isn’t a new idea (that users themselves are typically not going to come up with breakthrough innovations), but one that we need to constantly keep in mind. When I’m designing a system, I make a deal with the users who are involved in focus groups, JADs and other interviews: they tell me what they need to accomplish to meet their business goals, and I’ll design the best way to do it. In other words, I’ll treat them as the business subject matter experts, and they’ll treat me as the design expert.
There’s a constant struggle with users who insist on specific features (e.g., “the button has to be blue”, when I’m trying to create something that doesn’t even need a button) because they don’t have the perspective to spontaneously visualize the future that is possible for them. Designing BPM systems is particularly problematic, since manual business processes are part of the folklore of an organization, and changing them causes some amount of cultural disruption. Having users involved in the design process is necessary, but it’s also necessary not to be unduly influenced by protests of “but we’ve always done it this way”.
Strangely enough, I was on Amazon yesterday and under “My Recommendations” it came up with Flatland, a short book of fiction about geometry, published in 1880, that I haven’t read since I was in university:
Flatland…imagines a two-dimensional world inhabited by sentient geometric shapes who think their planar world is all there is. But one Flatlander, a Square, discovers the existence of a third dimension and the limits of his world’s assumptions about reality and comes to understand the confusing problem of higher dimensions.
As a designer, sometimes I just have to think like a Square in a Flatland.