In an NY Times article, marketing and design executives from Motorola, LG, and Nokia discuss how to make cellphone buyers flip for their phones. Anyone who is a UCD professional knows that for the average user, a robust feature set isn’t always the first reason a customer chooses one phone, or software bundle, or retailer over another.
One of the first pitches I made when I worked for my last company is “Make them want it.” What I meant by that was that we should design our product not only because people need to use it, we should also appeal to our customer’s emotions. “Business is personal,” I said over and over again. Business relationships are built upon the relationships forged between persons, and there’s no good reason why we couldn’t forge a similar deeply felt relationship between the customer and our product. That message wasn’t always well received, nor was it always well-understood. Tech companies are so focused on the features race that they often forget the real people who don’t have time to read manuals, or who don’t have the money to spend on expensive tech support contracts. People have businesses to run, lives to lead, and they want tech that helps them get that job done with as little effort as possible; it doesn’t hurt if it looks cool in the process.
Yet one of the biggest barriers to this design philosophy is the financial bottom line. Rita Gunther McGrath of the Columbia Business School says “There is an awful lot of pressure to keep the wheels turning instead of putting money into new innovation and development.” The biggest evidence of this is when the ratio of developers to user-centered design professionals is 10:1 (or greater). Another sign that you might be in trouble is if someone on the team asks “Why can’t we just let them read a manual?” or if someone says “We can’t make the product too easy to use because it’ll affect the number of tech support contracts we sell.”
That is so not a fun position to be in.
Still this article gives me hope. Companies are starting to understand that the warm and fuzzy, touchy-feely aspects of tech — human computer interaction, user-centered design methods and processes — are an important part of the product development process. That’s not only good news for UCD professionals, it’s excellent news for anyone who is a customer.
(Now I must figure out how to apply my UCD kung-fu to my librarian duties…)
