By cool, I do not necessarily mean the latest Phillipe Starck table lamp, or the 3DO video game.  I’m more concerned with things like the wheel, or McDonald’s restaurants, of Federal Express of Good Grips kitchen tools – things that are so right that they become nearly invisible, part of our daily lives in a way that a product like the Print Vac never could.  It has turn signals, an odometer, and most impressively, a tiny printer that prints out everything you’ve sucked up.  The Print Vac is just one extreme example, (admittedly mythical) of a kind of design where something gets made just because it is possible.

It is what we call “technology centered design.”  Technology centered design has several distinguishing characteristics:  it is engineering-led, the capabilities are developed before the use is defined, and the products which result can only use the ever expanding range of features as a means of differentiation in the market.

There have been things as downright weird as the Print Vac over the years, such as a robotic shaving machine.  But more centrally, it results in things that we are all expected to use, to understand, like incredibly complex TV/VCR remotes.  They, and thousands of consumer products like them, rely on features to differentiate themselves, and quite obviously, in a case like this, the features begin to overwhelm the use of the things themselves.

At a near diametric opposition to technology centered design are things like a lovely console television finished in genuine simulated wood grain, an example of what might be called, “market driven design.”

Market driven design is what happens when the development process too slavishly responds to the opinions of everyone and their aunt as to what they like, what they want.  Its evils are many, but the results are knockoffs and “me toos” and things that just are not as innovative, as interesting, or as good as they could be.

The alternative to market or technology-centered design is an approach with the slightly misleading label “user (or human) centered design.”  The misleading part comes from the fact that, in the best examples of the work, the focus is no only on people, but on how people and things are connected, how people come to use and to understand what things to.

Understanding that connection, defining the space in between people and technology is not as easy, actually, as being either market-or techno- centric, but in the long run; it’s a far more valuable effort.

Three ways of getting there
Be a genius.  If you could be – or hire – someone like Thomas Edison, who registered more than 1000 patents in his lifetime, you’d be pretty sure of making that connection from time to time.  This is not an entirely flip assertion.  Great, user-centered design inventions that fundamentally connect what things can do to what people need have been around for nearly as long as there has been some form of technology.  But for the longest time, an inspired connection was almost always the work of an individual like Edison.  Edison invented the incandescent light bulb in 1879.  He didn’t invent the parts, he didn’t discover electricity, but he looked at what was possible in the technologies he was fooling with and connected it to a need.

Be very intuitive. This connection can be, and often is, made by people who are decidedly not geniuses.  Deep intuitive insight is another time honored, but still rare, connector of people to things.  On the one hand, it is evident if fads, like the Rubik’s Cube or the Hula Hoop.  Rubik was no genius, but the cube certainly tapped into something out there.

The other hand in this case are more profound examples of intuitive approaches that more self-consciously sought to make the connection, to meet or understand a need.  High on that list would be something like Paul Rand’s 1961 UPS logo.  As the probably apocryphal story goes, this nearly timeless piece of work was the result of an half hour meeting with the UPS president and Rand’s daughter acting as test audience:  “It’s a package Daddy!”

Have a method.  Take something like the nuclear powered missile submarine, one of the more awesome technological achievements of our day – clearly, not developed by relining on either genius or intuition.  What made the first nuclear subs possible was, in large part, Admiral Rickover’s invention of the PERT chart, which coordinated and organized thousands of tasks, problems, and schedules over years of time.

Method has come to be a scary word.  To many, it sounds controlling, antithetical to design.  Methods do not have to come with manuals, diskettes, and years of training to offer powerful and reliable ways to make the connection between people and things.  Some of the best are exceptionally simple in practice, even though the might have taken years to develop.

For example, McKinsey & Co.’s justly famous “seven S” model of what makes an organization tick is as much of a method as it is a description.   It gives McKinsey consultants a way to look at the problem, a way to work through what they find out there at be sure they’ve examined, investigated, all the right pieces.  On a different but equally useful scale are things like notation languages and representational conventions.  These provided a common ground for groups of people working on complex issues.

Methods like these don’t automatically generate answers – which is too often the fairy tale claim of bad methods – but the y do something more important:  they structure the problem and provide ways of structuring the information that can lead to a solution.  Unlike management consulting or programming or nuclear engineering, design as a discipline is too often seen as without methods, and worse, without the need for them.  User-centered design is not just about paying attention to “needs” or “human factors,” but about having a method for making that connection between people and things.

A method must have focus and definition.  The methods we’ve mentioned above are not defined by their steps, but by what they take as their focus and by how they define the nature of that connection.  Rickover understood that the key to the problem of building a nuclear sub was convergence and coordination, not solving the individual problems – the focus.

In user-centered design, the focus has to be on the connection between users and things, not on one or the other.   The definition of the connection is probably the trickiest part of all this.  Most people think that need is the best way to describe it.  (I really need sneakers that light up when I walk.) I define this connection somewhat differently.  The connection that is most important for design is not need, but how people use things to make meaning in their lives.  People interpret the world and their place in it through the things that they use.  To ourselves and to one another, what we use to make sense of our lives grows out of the material conditions of our lives.

Making meaning

A five thousand year old guy was found frozen in a melting glacier in the Alps in late summer 1991.  Forensic anthropologists were able to reconstruct approximately what he looked like and build a reasonably lifelike model.  Fascinating, in a morbid sort of way, but what does that really tell us about how he lived, about what his life was like?  It wasn’t until archaeologists excavated the whole site and found his tools, his clothes, his equipment, that they were able to tell a more complete story about him.

Arrowheads and dagger points are one thing.  Beepers and other paraphernalia of modern culture do not tolerate the simple equation of meaning with function.  What they “are” depends on a whole lot more than what they do.  Beepers, for example, first emerged into the culture as an exceptionally handy gadget for physicians.  Not too long after that, in urban neighborhoods across America, there seemed to be a sudden explosion of 13 to 17 year old doctors hanging out at street corners and near public telephones.  And finally, we are used to them, are, as a culture, accepting and extending them.  The pager is being transformed again into a basic part of the personal communications infrastructure.

The same artifact, but with different meanings, based in different uses; conversely, as the uses expanded, it meant different things to the people who saw it, who thought about using it.

Where this all comes down is in the choices people make about what they buy.  Two artifacts as simple as two flashlights offer profoundly different options for what someone wants to say about what is important to them.  One (red and white plastic) costs less than two dollars at the corner drugstore, the other (blue anodized aluminum) costs about seven and can be found in upscale catalogs like Sharper Image and Hammacher Schlemmer.  A purely functional analysis might say that the Maglite is “better” because it has more features, is more durable, and comes in a wider range of colors and sizes.  Yet for some people, the cheap one tells a better story, a story more amenable to their own values, their own sense of what is important about a flashlight.  There is not, obviously, a single continuum along which one of these is better, one worse.

Making it work

How do you figure out how to make things that people will want to use, that people will value as tools for constructing their lives?

This is the basic framework we use for doing it.  Basically, it is a series of models and concepts that, in a progression from the concrete to the abstract and back again, are tools for understanding the connection between people and things.  It has two major components: the first is about moving from what’s out there up to structures that make senses of it.  The second, which is moving from structures to new things, we’ll go over further on in this paper.  We rely on our clients to tell us what they can do, what the nature of the things we are dealing with is.  The real challenge, especially once you move away from needs, is understanding the people, because what you are looking for is not what people say, but what they do, what they use to understand the world.

Anthropology is the discipline most concerned with doing that, with connecting culture and people and artifacts into a system.  Margaret Mead, and the other pioneering ethnographers had two main tools – a notebook and an “informant.”  Classical anthropology was built on these tools.

Just as beepers are more complex than arrowheads, our tools have gotten a bit more complex.  Our fieldwork comes through the rather new discipline of “video ethnography.”  Once we decide where the best place to watch people using things is, we take a bunch of cameras, a bunch of computer controlled video decks, miles of cables, microphones, and small gray computers with little colored logos out into the real world.  For hours at a time, for days and days, we videotape people doing the things they do, without interference, where and when the usually do them.

When we get all these hours of videotape back to the office, we use a set of computer programs we’ve developed to help us log, analyze, and structure the material.  What we are looking for are what we call ”particulars.”  This is a very “thick” description of what is happening in the places where our client’s products are being used.  In the same way that McKinsey “7S” model helps them, we’ve developed a model with the catchy acronym AEIOU, which stands for Activities, Environments, Interactions, Objects and Users.

If you break your description of just about anything down into activities, environments, interactions, objects, and users, you can be fairly sure that you’ve hit all the particulars.

Activities are goal-directed sets of actions, things that people have to or want to accomplish, like filling up their car with gasoline.

Environments are where activities take place.  These need to be considered in fairly broad terms: we also need to keep the activities in mind as part of the definition of the environment.  A convenience store is self-contained, but an airport control room, where all of the radio connections between pilots and planes and FAA centers effectively extends the environment beyond the room where the controllers sit.

Interactions are, unlike activities, always dyadic, always between a person and someone or something else.  Interactions are the building blocks of activities.

Objects are the building blocks of environments, and key players in the activities and interactions.  What is interesting is that you have to see things in use to really describe them.

Finally, there are the Users themselves:  Who comes there?   Who does what ? How do they act?

Add all of this detail up, and what do you have?  Nothing, until you begin to look for patterns, for the regular connections between users, activities, or interaction and the environment and objects.

Take the example of a gift shop.  A person takes a look into the aisle, but doesn’t really move into it.  We came to call this behavior the “end of aisle lean.”  I’m sure you’ve seen it, and probably engaged in it without too much thought about it.  But it is interesting where it led us.  Our client had asked us to think about re-organizing their stores, to give some thought to how they should word their signs, where they should place them.  What this pattern revealed to us was that thinking about the words on the signs was the completely wrong idea for how people find stuff in this environment.  Our clients had assumed that people came in with a specific item in mind and needed help finding it, and that they read the signs to do that.  Instead, what we realized they do is come in with an idea of the kind of thing they want, and that that is defined, for customers, in terms of the visual language of greeting cards.  So what these people are doing looking into the aisle, scanning not the signs, but the look of the displays.  You look, you see a bunch of pastel colors and gig gold foil letters and you don’t need to read the categories to know that this just isn’t for your 15-year-old nephew.  What patterns eventually reveal, once you begin to figure out where they come from, are the most important, most abstract level of thinking about how people interact with things.  We the things that lead to patterns structures.  Now, there are lots of ways to characterize structures – anything from rational choice economics to unresolved Oedipal conflicts – but within our approach, the most valuable and generally applicable one is the notion of frameworks.

The idea of a framework is one that has roots in both literary theory and cognitive psychology.  But the idea can be illustrated fairly simply.  Take a billion or so stars visible in the night sky as the raw material of a perception.  A framework is the set of biases, assumptions, and knowledge that influences what you see when you look at them.  A framework is what explains, or at least describes, the difference between how Galileo looked at those stars, and how Vincent Van Gogh saw them.  Objectively, the same sky, but seen through different frames, not the same sky at all.

Frameworks are not simple, nor monolithic, nor even stable.  They are quite complex, permeable, and dynamic.  What is most important to know about the concept though is that there are three distinct kinds of influence on them, three ways in which the world (and its artifacts) affect how people understand things: individual, social and cultural.  Take a simple (albeit fairly cool) object like a pair of shoes.

My friend Julie bought a certain pair of shoes because she likes them.  They are comfortable and they fit her style and image of herself.  They make a nice alternative to her green Doc Marten boots.  Those kinds of reasons, those kinds of choices, result from an individual level of a framework.

But the choice of a shoe is also constrained, influenced by social factors, but what particular kinds, brands, styles and colors mean to the people with whom the wearer associates (works, hangs out, wants to impress, and so on).  In New York, in Chicago, in LA, shoes have an important role in gang life.  They aren’t just personal choices, they are emblems, currency in a language of identity and membership.  Wearing Nikes (or certain kinds of Nikes) means you are part of one group and decidedly not of another.

Finally, that shoes can mean anything at all is a cultural matter.  “Clothes make the man” makes sense to us.  It doesn’t to a lot of people in the world.  And certainly, that there is a meaningful difference between Thom McCanns and Doc Martens would be ludicrous notion to the rather large portion of the world for whom shoes are either not an issue or purely utilitarian.

Making it real

The second (downslope) side of the “user centered” process is the move from describing the world to building, or perhaps re-building, the world.  You’ve gone out, described the particulars in mind-numbing detail, noticed, identified, and cataloged the patterns, and made sense of those patterns by figuring out how people’s frameworks make the patterns happen.

This is where the fun starts.  When you know the structures, you can manipulate them.  You can use them to offer alternatives to people.  The world you’ve described is built on what is already out there, but the world you can build can be abased on the new technologies, new capabilities, new things that have been sitting waiting on the sidelines while the people of the equation has been being filled in.

Here’s the difference in a quaint midwestern homily:  My mother was a classic late 1950s, early 1960s cook.  Betty Crocker was her goddess.  She cooked step by step, with precise measurements, times, and temperatures.  But every once in a while she would call up my great grandmother and say, “Gram, how do you make those biscuits?”  And my great grandmother would respond with something on the order of, “well, you take some flour and soda and salt, add enough water, mix it until it is the right consistency and then bake them until they are done.”  This drove my mom nuts.  But my great grandmother understood the structure of baking.  And she could make anything – even things that had never been made before – because she was working with what happened to be in the kitchen that day.  This is what great design can do once it has a great structure to work with, once it knows how things affect each other.  Maybe not as fattening as Grandma Ethel’s spice cake with penuche icing, but just as tasty.

The move from these structures out to real things isn’t my forte.  That’s why I work designers, architects and programmers.  But let me walk, very quickly, through the steps that come out of structures:  conceptual models, designs for things, and prototypes of those things.

Going back to the gas station, one of the structures we developed was about the way in which people oriented themselves, how they found the places they needed to find.  We also found that there was a consistent mismatch between what the attendants used to locate people and cars and the framework that customers used to locate themselves and the other important things on the lot.  This conceptual model was one of the directions that came out of that.  It developed the notion theta there needed to be a common point of reference and easy visual access between the attendant and the customer.

One of our product designers developed this as a design direction in a document that we gave to the architects we were working with on the project.  It is not a spec drawing in any senses, but it did clearly turn the model we had sketched out into something the architects could work with.  Which they did.  Not all of the design concepts are as robust as this one was, but they all, because they are so well grounded, are as clear and as useful to the people who make things as this one was to the architects on the project.

To reiterate the process:  start with describing the world that is out there, use methods to get to useful abstractions about it, and then use those abstractions to put things back into the world.  Then start all over again, evaluating and watching the results.

What cool things do

Because we use things to make sense of the world, when you put something out there that is different, you change the way that people think about other things.  What you change, actually, are the frameworks.  And if you do this well, and do it in directions that are strategic, you begin to control the rules of the game and leave your competitors in the dust, not because you’ve got more features than they do, but because you have redefined what is valuable about the thing and they are still playing by the old rules.

Frameworks change as the material of which they are made changes.  And those changes can be powerful and long lasting.  For example:  helicopters were one of the key symbols of the postwar Red Cross, symbolizing the marriage of technology and humanism.  But the development of the Cobra gunship and its widely televised use in Vietnam changed all that, changed what they could mean to people, changed what their primary meaning was for almost everyone.  And helicopters – no matter how often they are used to deliver aid or rescue children – will never really be a good symbol for the Red Cross again.

What does it take to do this work?  Four things:  data, patience, teams and iterations.  And some cameras.  But these are the more important elements.

Data You need lots of data to look for patterns.  Margaret Mead spent more than three years in Samoa.  You’ve got to be able to sample widely, got to have situations to look at when you’ve got a hunch about a pattern that you are chasing down.  And although we think it works best, data doesn’t have to be videotape; it can be interviews, photos, notes, whatever.

Patience One of the things that Freud strove to teach the early psychoanalysts was what he called “evenly hovering attention.”  What he meant by this was that it is important not to discount anything.  That you can’t really listen if you’ve got too many hypotheses going into it.  This is probably more important than having lots of videotape.  You’ve got to let the patterns emerge.  You can’t force, can’t hurry it.  We sometimes spent hours going over 30 seconds of tape, and weeks thinking that there was nothing there to discover.  But there always is.

Interdisciplinary teams We could not do this in an office full of anthropologists.  It would be even worse in an office full of psychoanalysts.  Designers and architects and clients all participate in the fieldwork, in the analysis.  Different people – with different frameworks – notice different things.  Different disciplines bring different sets of skills to the party.  We also use teams to supplement the basic fieldwork by bouncing those results off of those generated by other methods and other kinds of data.

Iterations As much as I’ve tried to make this all sound like it moves smoothly from one stage to the next, it doesn’t.  The first set of patterns always turns out to incomplete;  the first set of structures never can explain all the patterns.  You’ve got to be willing to throw out those efforts when they are not coherent or far reaching enough to be useful.  Moreover, the concepts, designs and prototypes themselves have to be part of an iterative process, working out bugs and kinks.

Finally, I want to be clear that this approach is not a panacea.  It is not an approach that will solve any and every problem.  It is particularly well suited for issues in product design, interface/interaction design, and environments – in short, whenever you can watch someone doing or using something that you are interested in rethinking.  We’ve also used this approach successfully in less obviously suitable situations, such as understanding and redefining processes that work groups use, or figuring out how an as yet uninvented product might work.

Conclusion

Design, broadly defined, is fundamentally a part not only of everyday life, but also of the dynamics that make our world constantly changing, constantly evolving.  What I’ve been outlining here is not a method for designing things, but a methodical approach to understanding that world, those dynamics, so that design can play a more important, more profound role in it.  WE can talk all we want about “profound change” and “understanding users,” but it requires something more, some really good tools to thing with, to develop a design –centered approach to doing that.  We believe that these ideas, these methods, are a big part of getting there.