user centered design

Requirements Gathering or Requirements Generating?

May 7, 2020 Design

This question hasn’t bothered me more in my career than in recent times after I went through an online UX course. So in UX parlance, what would be considered as a reasonable vocabulary — is it gathering of the requirements or is it generating of the requirements? Designers ought to comprehend user needs and generate feasible ideas for the real world, so clearly, it’s the connotation of the word ‘gathering’ which is at conflict here more than the approach itself.

According to the information given on his website, Joe Natoli is a speaker on topics of User Experience (UX) and Design for 29 years, from national and global conferences, and has launched eight successful online courses. Two of which I happened to reflect upon on Udemy a few weeks ago and both were insightful at the very least. However, it was his differentiation and comparison of requirements gathering versus requirements generating in both the courses that made me unusually inquisitive about the synonymous terms. It’s also purely language semantics at play here as I explain in detail below. But first, this is Joe’s take on the point in question from the UX Strategy Fundamentals course:

I want you to know about requirements up front (which) comes from a very smart lady by the name of Kim Goodwin who said that requirements cannot be gathered. OK this is important because I hear that phrase a lot (and) in the last 26 years I’ve heard it more times than I can count. We’re going to gather requirements which essentially means we’re going to get a bunch of people in a room and they’re going to tell us what they need and we’re going to write them down. We’re gathering from them. OK. It does not work that way. And if it does it’s not going to be successful. As she says there’s no requirements tree back. We’re not going to go pick requirements off the tree or any one of these and this one looks particularly good. I think we’ll do that. It doesn’t work that way. You have to iterate and generate requirements you have to kick them around and decide what’s right what matters what doesn’t matter what can work what isn’t going to work. It’s a process. It’s not an answer. You need to find out what users need to be able to do with your website in terms of functionality in terms of the content that they see and interact with in terms of data if they fill out a form and give you information or they look at reporting where they get data and information.

UX Strategy Fundamentals → Section 4: Determining and Controlling Project Scope – Lecture 17. UX Focused Requirements: An Introduction.
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Innovative Thinking And User-Centred Design

October 10, 2019 Design

The term “innovation” has become the favourite lexicon of corporate executives for any discussion relating to building a vision for their organizations, and obviously the startups who need to raise eyebrows for getting noticed and getting funded. ‘Innovation’ has an aura that sets our imagination rolling, often conjuring up an impression of an impossible modern future replete with robots, gadgets, and automative mechanisms. In short, it’s presumed that innovation would hand out an inventive gadget, service, or product that will make our lives a lot pleasurable with delightful interactions. For instance, skillfully using technologies such as AI to track your location and provide an accurate weather forecast or respond smartly to your question, putting wireless sensors so that you’re able to park your car smoothly. As I write this article there are numerous startups engrossed in experimenting with future technologies in shaping our landscape. Although the role of the ‘customer’ is being diminished somewhere between the business, the investors’ expectations & the discussion surrounding innovative technology. It’s not just a need to involve the target audience in an end-to-end product or service development activity but critically put the ‘customer’ in the centre of every innovation conversation.

Innovation by Design

Innovation Through Customer Insights

Organizations have acknowledged the significance of customer experience in sustaining future innovations, during and after any innovative idea is launched. However, the intrinsic drive of entrepreneurs to solve problems through technology has never gained so much visibility than in recent times as companies make attempts at product development for market dominance & financial gains. At times, this drives focus away from the customer experience and onto developing features that may miss the target audience invariably putting the entire roadmap of the product in jeopardy. For some startups or companies, the issue of relentless product development without managing customer expectations seems to be emanating from their internal challenges that are dictated more or less by corporate decisions. So for instance, on a strategic level, senior stakeholders choose a platform for driving automation for customer needs either without an understanding of the user-base or taking insights from a previous product launch. Eventually, by the time the “idea” percolates down to the tactical phase, one cannot rule out the complexity of its interaction and flow regardless of whether it’s solving any problems based on the experience that it delivers (or it doesn’t). Organizations back their leadership’s decisions of shaping the vision and it’s left upon the dev & design teams to implement the final product, within a strict timeline, despite the glaring loopholes and no understanding of the evolving user base. Designers obviously take a backseat.

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YouTube Started As A Dating Site

July 25, 2019 Design Technology

When I read this for the first time I cringed. It sounded unnatural that YouTube, the world’s largest online video streaming company with over a billion users each month, was conceived as an online video dating site! So here’s some back story. In March 2016 at the SXSW festival, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen revealed the actual predicament surrounding the launch of their streaming service in 2005. He said…

“We always thought there was something with video there, but what would be the actual practical application? We thought dating would be the obvious choice.”

Source

From Video Dating To Video Sharing

YouTube - Mobile

YouTube was conceived in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim in 2005 while working for PayPal. The entrepreneurs initially found a market in matchmaking through video, even taking out ads on Craigslist in Las Vegas and Los Angeles in which they offered to pay women $20 to upload videos of themselves to the site. No one took the offer seriously. It didn’t matter to the founders, because by then, users had begun uploading all sorts of videos from dogs to their vacations and they began pondering over a fundamental question “why not let users define what YouTube is all about?” so they completely revamped their website, making it more open and general. By 2006, YouTube was already the fastest growing website on the Internet hosting more than 65,000 videos. Then on October 9, 2006, Google dropped a bomb by announcing they were acquiring YouTube for US$1.65 billion in stock. It was the second-largest acquisition for the search giant at the time.

Co-Design And User Innovation

Although it might seem like a case of ‘serendipity’ in the first instance with YouTube going from a video dating site to a video sharing one, here’s why I believe it was really a case of oversight. The founders formerly developed a vision to devise a product or service using online video streaming tech as a platform for matchmaking, but in that their vision of connecting with the users was grossly miscalculated because users just weren’t looking at video as a dating tool. Their initial concept could have been refined if they’d involved users in the conceptual stages of design iteration. The involvement of users early on provides the creators with an advantage at mobilising resources towards a focussed area of user’s concerns prior to the launch, although their open-mindedness did save them the day. As opposed to co-design or the user-centred model, it seems like YouTube followed a Linear Innovation Model consisting of research and development of product or service, which is then marketed and sent out to the users.

Speaking of which, co-design or the user innovation process is the act of designing concepts with the users (co-design is often referred to as participatory design by the design community) involving the intermediate users or direct consumers.

In other words, it’s not enough to involve engineers, designers, managers and other project owners into the creative process rather they need to be active co-designers in channelising energies into building actionable plans and implementing prototypes. That’s the way forward to meet some of the biggest challenges we face as humankind.

The innovation process comes with ambiguity and it’s often derailed due to several reasons, notwithstanding management oversight (like in the case of YouTube), misconceived notions about product utilization by end-users and last but not the least, being blinded by or trying to resolve the problems and challenges from a single spectrum thought process. In that, YouTube was created on the basic idea of connecting people through video streaming at cheaper rates but then it ultimately led to overlooking the users’ latent needs, a basic ingredient at shaping customers’ experience.

It’s quite likely, in a participatory design method, and by involving all the stakeholders of the soon-to-be-launching service the founders could have discovered to their surprise that instead of recorded videos users preferred to date using other discreet tools wherein their identities aren’t compromised or misjudged in the first impression. It’s dating after all. Lastly, the participatory design process should not be mistaken for crowdsourcing in which groups of interested parties contribute to the creation of ideas in an open forum, such as the Internet, in achieving a cumulative result. Imagine how different our world would be if end-users were involved as co-designers in every project, end-to-end, not just as research subjects but as an important aspect with any product or service design business. That’d be the true essence of any user-centred design methodology.