An excellent session covering different peoples thoughts on the value of user research. It was split into 3 quick presentations from 3 panelists detailing their opinions on UCD (user centred design) and ACD (activity centred design)

Moderator: Christina Wodtke CEO, Cucina Media
Robert Hoekman Jr Interaction Designer | Consultant, www.rhjr.net and author of “Designing the obvious”
Sarah Bloomer Principal, Sarah Bloomer & Co
Mark Schraad Sr User Interaction Designer, AOL

Each panelists were given the task to speak through 20 slides with a time limit of 20 seconds per slide.

Mark Schraad - UCD advocate
A few points that Mark raised:

• UCD is the baseline to building richer interactions
• A systematic approach is required to achieve true context
• Good UCD currently considers usage, goals, activity theory and human factors model, but this is too simplistic
• The reason they are too simplistic - “users can’t tell you what they don’t know”. Due to this surveys / focus groups are short sited and as such largely redundant.
• Mark raised that you “can never know to much” and called this “the sponge effect”
• The main point he raised: better research based on tools and structure rather than process is needed and we need to interact with experts outside web design (such as cognitive experts)

Sarah Bloomer - believes we should ignore users… sometimes
A few points Sarah raised:

• We should understand how / when to ignore users
• Designs are about people, activities and situations, but also about business need
• Users also expect unexpected experiences, which can be “beautiful”… it can’t be unexpected if design is totally user led
• Its also difficult to obtain good user input, as sometimes is subconscious / emotional which is impossible / difficult for users to communicate
• Believes that persona’s are not helpful (”how is a design impact by knowing that the user is a mother of 3 children driving a certain car”)
• Instead of persona’s we should create / collect stories based on business need (related this to observing customers in a phone shop… never spoke to them, just asked the shop assistants the “stories”)

Robert Hoekman Jr - ACD advocate
Rob raised the following points:

• Problem with UCD is that its slow, which usually conflicts with business goals
• Users also don’t always know what they want (Rob mentioned how a fast food chain launched a low carb burger after customer research, but it flopped).
• Opinions of users are also different (Rob related this to user feedback on a new design - one person loved it, another hated it)
• Even fans don’t necessarily know (example used was a mac forum on the ipod announcement, where people believed it wouldn’t take off
• Users are bit web designers, so we shouldn’t let them make design decision
• User research tries narrow down audience via persona’s, but this can be incredibly inaccurate if product / service offering is wide
• We should design for activity instead and forget about users (after asking the audience only a handful of people said persona’s were useful in projects and this was mainly because of stakeholder buy in rather than delivering the final product).
• ACD is a lot cheaper and quicker. Due to this it can lead to quicker return on investment.
• We shouldn’t ignore users forever, just during the initial project stage.

After the presentations we went onto audience questions.

“How do the panels know they are right?”
Rob highlighted the importance of metrics and those results can prove success.

“What is the panels experience of profile targeted / adaptive sites?”
Rob raised that this is what amazon do. Christina highlighted that 40% of users of the yahoo homepage don’t personalise, so personalisation isn’t always the way to make a site truly user centric.

“Whats better - redesign or rolling design changes?”
Rob said that major redesigns should “die” and incremental changes is the way to go. Small changes can be more beneficial, due to a better cost benefit.

“Are persona’s just barbies for designers? Are they ever useful?”
Quick and dirty persona’s can be useful to give a high level view, but generally the answer was no!

Overall a provocative session which makes me think that ACD is the way to go!