Design- Human Centered Design vs Activity Centered Design?

As a design professional, our entire success and failure rests on -DESIGN. What is design? What are the basic types of design? When I tried to explore, I got very interesting insight from Don Normans website*.The same is my understanding and inspiration behind this article. He has discussed designs at a good length. To start with, there are two categories of design:

• Human Centered Design (HCD)
• Activity Centered Design (ACD)

HCD -The most crucial principle of HCD is to “know your user.” It is utmost important for any design to be created with a detailed deep knowledge of the users. Such design helps to overcome the poor design. By emphasizing the needs and abilities of those who were to use, usability and understandability of products can be improved.

One basic philosophy of HCD is to listen to users, to take their requirements and understanding seriously. Yes, listening to customers is always wise, but acceding to their requests, wishes and desires may lead to overly complex designs. Several major software companies, proud of their human-centered philosophy, suffer from this problem. Their design gets more complex and less understandable with each revision.

And what happens when a product is designed to be used by varied people or anyone in the world?

ACD -Activity-Centered philosophy tends to guard against this aspect as the focus is upon the Activity, not the Human. As a result, there is a cohesive, well-articulated design model. If a user suggestion fails to fit within this design model, it should be discarded. Alas, all too many companies, proud of listening to their users, would put it in.

ACDs are developed with a deep understanding of the activities that were to be learned or in other words skills required to be learned and later performed successfully. They are created by design teams. Difference lies as these designers used their own understanding of the activities to be learned and performed to determine how the design would be operating.

Here, what is needed is a strong, authoritative designer who can examine the requirements, and suggestions; and evaluate them in terms of skill to be imparted as end objective. When necessary, it is essential to be able to ignore the requests. This is the goal to cohesion and understandability. Sometimes what is needed is a design dictator who says, “Ignore what users say: I know what’s best for them.” The case of Apple Computer is illustrative. Apple’s products have long been admired for ease of use. Nonetheless, Apple replaced its well known, well-respected human interface design team with a single, authoritative (dictatorial) leader. Did usability suffer? On the contrary: its new products are considered prototypes of great design*.

The “listen to your users” produces incoherent designs. The “ignore your users” can produce horror stories, unless the person in charge has a clear vision or Conceptual Model for the product. The person in charge must follow that vision and not be afraid to ignore findings. Yes, listen to customers, but don’t always do what they say*.

Human-Centered Design guarantees good outcome as well as it leads to improvements of bad ones. Good Human-Centered Design will generally leads to lesser failures. It also ensures that products work as per expectations of the users. Are we aiming at good design only? We (most of us)dream and aspire for great design.We aspire for customer/ user's delight. I don't think, it can be achieved with just a Good Design. We need Great Design. For sure Great design can only be created through breaking the rules,Thinking beyound what is generally accepted and practiced,by pushing forward with a clear concept and conviction of the end result. In such case,we shall be ready for both great successes and great failures. If we want great rather than good, this is what we must do.

Note*-Column written for Interactions. © CACM, 2005.The definitive version was published in Interactions, 12. 4, (July + August, 2005). Pp. 14-19. There are excerpts of the same article used here for purely non- commercial use.

Learn Just One Move to Win

This short story brings insight on how to bring lateral thinking into practice,and how effectively it can be implied while imparting skills to the learner, once the ultimate objective is clearly defined.

There was a 10 year old boy, who had lost his left arm in an accident. He wanted to learn Martial Arts. His father took him to a Martial Arts school. The Grandmaster looked at the boy and enrolled him as his disciple. The boy was very eager and enthusiastic to learn Martial Arts.

The next day, the master taught him a move and asked him to practice that move. The move was difficult but the boy kept practicing it for weeks and then he was comfortable with that move. He said to his teacher, “Master, I’ve been practicing this move for a month now. Should I be learning some other moves as well?” The master said, “No Son, you just need to master this move. I’ll let you know as and when you would be required to learn other moves.”

The boy kept practicing that move for months but he was a little perplexed. A Martial Arts tournament was approaching and he just knew a single move.

On the day of the tournament, the master took the boy to the venue and told him to be relaxed and give it his best shot. The initial fights were easy for the boy and he soon made his way into the quarter finals. The opponent in the quarter final was strong but the boy was on a roll and he forced his way through to the semi finals of the tournament. He was happy and very surprised with the way things had gone so far. He was up against a very strong competitor in the semi final. His master told him to breathe easy, relax his nerves and go for the kill. He said “Do that move flawlessly." The boy went on to win the semi final and this was it.

He simply could not believe this at all. He had not even thought in his wildest of dreams that he would be up against the last fight of the night, and that too for the final trophy. Yes, this is it. He said to himself, as he was standing next to his competitor in the finals. Now, it’s a matter of nerves. The boy fought bravely in the finals and won the tournament. He was ecstatic and his master hugged him and kissed him on the forehead.

On the way back, the boy was still perplexed as to how he won the tournament. He could not help but asked his teacher, “Master, how come I won the tournament with just one move."

His master paused for a while and answered “You have almost mastered one of the toughest moves in Judo. And the only known defense to this move is to grab the opponent’s left arm.”

Thinking About Thinking II-Six Thinking Hats

Here is a well made presentation on Six Thinking Hats from Slideshare. It is aimed at readers who are not aware of this concept. It shall also provide good recall value for those who had attended the session. The presentation is well packed with information and explanation. It shall work as input for the questions raised on the same topic in my earlier post.

From: nathanr07, 11 months ago

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Thinking About Thinking

A full day session with Edward de Bono was an interesting experience. The session was aimed at “Thinking about thinking”- that is how I would like to put it. The session was divided into two sub sessions: Six Thinking Hats and Lateral Thinking*.
The first session was directing our thinking on a well defined path by using ‘Six Thinking Hats’. It is a powerful technique that helps to look at important decisions from a number of different perspectives. It opens up the opportunity for creativity within Decision Making. It helps to make better decisions by pushing you to move outside habitual ways of thinking. It helps to understand the full complexity of the decision, and spot issues and opportunities to which one might otherwise be blind.It allows necessary emotion and skepticism to be brought into what would otherwise be a purely rational decision.The technique also helps persistently pessimistic people to be positive and creative.

While interacting with other attendees during the session brakes, I received a mixed reaction to the Six Thinking Hats tool. A large number of people agreed upon the use and success of the tool; at the same time few insisted that everyone uses the same technique while making a decision. The difference is that here the path is defined and well planned.

Here, I would like to pose two inter- related questions:

1. How many of us were making decisions (personal/ organisational) by taking in account (consciously/ sub-consciously) the factors described in Six Thinking hats?
   
2. How ‘the Six Thinking Hats’ technique is going to impact our decision making in future?
   

I did collect certain amount of data on the same day, I will share it once I get more opinions on the same.
So wear your Thinking Hats and express it...


Note *- I will discuss the second session- Lateral Thinking in my next blog.