Lately I’ve been following the user vs expert-discussion prompted this time by an article in Wired Magazine featuring the guys from 37signals. It’s an old discussion, but as users get more and more involved on different levels of design processes the question of who you are designing for pops up more frequently. Hence the Norman vs 37signals-dispute isn’t the only thing out there touching upon the subject. Here too user involvement is questioned.
To me the discussion is exciting, but disturbing too. I must admit that initially I felt that my area of expertise was under heavy attack. But then again I guess that the etnographic method and it’s user/human focus has been under attack for more than hundred years now, so just because the world of tech has discovered the user fairly recently, and might abandon listening to them already doesn’t mean that I’m becoming obsolete. Still the dicussion is disturbing though.
As I strove my way through the first sixtysomething comments on 37signals’ answer to Norman I wondered why everybody assumed that one side of the table was wrong and the other right. I saw nobody questioning the premises of the whole disucssion. Why ask if the user is right, and on the other side why ask if the expert is? Who is right should nok count for anything in development!
Why?
1) The user: It’s not about the user being right or wrong nor is designing for the user about succumbing to the user’s needs and wishes. It’s all about the user EXPERIENCE and how that experience is interpreted and analyzed. From my point of view you’re doing a pretty bad user experience job if you act as nothing else than a spokes person for the user’s needs.
2) The expert: “Call it arrogance or idealism, but they would rather fail than adapt. ‘I’m not designing software for other people, ‘Hansson says. ‘I’m designing it for me.’ ” (quote from above mentioned article). To that I have to ask: which designer live on a far away deserted planet, isolated from other people or in a vacuum without the possibility of interaction, conversations with, and inspiration from fellow human beings? No products arise in a vacuum. We are all engaged in and influenced by our surroudings including other people, let’s call them users, and products are a result of that. In addition, the designer may be an expert, but she’s most likely a user too…
Thus the discussion is in vain from my point of view. It’s not about who is right or wrong, but all about experience.
I work with him. We do our job, and I go home at 5 o’clock. I don’t have to like him!
A few weeks ago I was at a birthday party and I tried to explain to my dinner partner what it is that I do for a living. I told her that I do mini inquiries into social capital in organizations. I interview and observe people, try to determine the state of their relationships, stress problematic areas of communication, and then make recommendations to our software designer. Then we work together to figure out good solutions, and thereby implementing the findings of the inquiries in the design of the software. Or at least that has been the desired process so far, I told her.
The word social capital seemed to stir something in her though. She suddenly looked almost upset and when I finished my rant she asked me “all that talk about relations - do we have to like each other at work in order to be productive, effective, innovative?”. I couldn’t quite figure out what made her upset, but the question I think was meant rhetorically (hence the quote of the beginning of this post). I seriously did not know what to answer her.
Later on I figured maybe her reaction was due to the lack of consistency and content when we talk about relations. We talk a lot about the social web, and how it creates relations, and how those relations create value (although ‘value’ is a very disputed word), but who talks of the nature of relations? Of what they consists of? And what they have to consist of in order to create value?
My colleague Thomas provided me with a brilliant link to a piece discussing the measurement of social capital. At first I was a bit skeptic because the author - who are the authors by the way? Who are behind gnudung.com? - keeps stressing the search for hard data to measure in the growing body of social capital theory. I was thinking to myself that maybe you’re asking the wrong questions if you persist on looking for hard data to answer your questions. Maybe you shouldn’t look for the amount of social capital, maybe you ought to look at the meaning of social capital…the meaning of trust, the meaning of reciprocity - what does those factors mean for a social network for instance over time? Later on I started to get down right disillusioned as the piece kept going on about quantitative methods and the hardship of measuring social capital quantitatively.
Well I know it’s all a matter of your perspective on scientific method, and my initial skepticism when reading the piece quickly vanished as I was once again soothed and reminded that Ideally, measures of social capital should be thouroughly based on, and tied to, the conceptual framework for the specific study. Basicly that means that the questions you ask has to guide your choice of method. I couldn’t agree more. Thanks, Thomas for the reference.