People Centered Design

I once made a comment to a group of friends that “I analyze people I will never meet and get paid to tell them how to do their jobs.” It’s kind of a bleak statement, but I often feel that way when I’m in fire-fighter mode at work making up for lack of time. Sometimes when in-between all the engineers and managers you get lost and forget why you’re fighting over workflows, buttons, and colors.

Well, Don Norman’s essay, “Words Matter. Talk About People: Not Customers, Not Consumers, Not Users”, is a nice reminder of the people I’m fighting for in the trenches. Norman writes that we need to quit using terms such as “customer”, “consumer”, and “user” because “we distance ourselves from the people for whom we design by giving them descriptive and somewhat degrading names”. I can only agree.

In fact, in the past I’ve actually attached names of real people to use cases. It’s easy to do. You go to your Customer Support department (the people manning the phones) and ask them for the name of the person that calls them usually about once a week. Now when you’re in the middle of a design you can ask yourself, “What would John Doe from Acme Corp think?” It’s a wonderful way to stay focused when everyone around you wants the most in the product in the least amount of time. Because if you don’t, no one else will even thing to ask until John Doe from Acme Corp is tying up the support lines.