Design Empathy for Analyticals

Earlier this week I attended the BayCHI Talk Stanford Professor Larry Leifer on "design ambiguity". A few things he said struck me as very valuable insights.

Promoting Design Empathy in Non-Designers

Leifer stated that the real value and goal of Stanford's Design School (d.School) is not to teach design, but rather to sensitize non-design types to the value of design. I'd say he pretty much summed up what I do everyday. I try to demonstrate to product planners and software engineers that looking at a task from the point of view of the user's experience is not optional anymore, it is essential to business success.

I see it as my job, and the job of my organization, to create compelling new customer value wrapped in an experience that is simple, elegant and memorable. To do this, we must remember that most of the product planners and engineers that currently populate companies came out of school long before entities like the d.School existed, and have very likely never been formally introduced to user experience as a discipline. Furthermore, it is even more unlikely that they understand how user experience design relates to the code they write and the products they ultimately produce. It's the job of the business people to enlighten them. Designers have another important task to perform.

Designers Must Protect Ambiguity

According to Leifer, designers must protect ambiguity because the business people, engineers, product managers and finance folks certainly won't. It is the designers that must protect and nurture the idea that we don't know everything, that we can't be inside a users thoughts, or imagine every possible permutation of an answer. There remain things we simply don't know or don't realize are correlated.

For example, business people that specialize in groceries can tell you that dry cereals are a very profitable item. In fact, they may well be the most profitable (hence the space allotted for them). But when asked what the key competitors to cereal are, most think linearly and respond: eggs or bagels or some other food item.

Actually, the key competitor to breakfast cereal is sleep -specifically the fifteen meets more of it you can get if you decide to skip breakfast.

Ambiguous? I'll say. Someone has to suspend analytical thought and put themselves in the context of the drowsey user in order to make this connection. That someone should be the designer a surrogate for the user.