Now is a very exciting time to be a user-centred designer.
The industry is strong, the pace of change is fast and there
are many interesting projects to be involved in. Not only
is there plenty of work, but our work is no longer limited
to business applications and company websites – many
design opportunities are in mobile, ubiquitous and web
applications. We also have the chance to extend into
business, lifestyle and social design.
Unfortunately, I don’t see this happening much. From my
place in the practitioner world I see most of the excellent
design work happening without any knowledge,
understanding or incorporation of user-centred design.
And I see far too many user-centred designers churning
out the same old techniques, spinning the same old
rhetoric and running the same suite of ineffective
usability tests.
Worse still, many clients I talk to are unhappy with the
available user-centred design resources. They are
unhappy with consultants who fail to understand the
domain in which they work, focus only on the users and
produce shallow, surface work they could have done
themselves. They can’t find staff with experience in both
user-centredness and design.
How did we get to this point? Is what we do so difficult
that mere mortals can’t do it, or do we just pretend it is?
Is it too hard to teach or are we poor teachers? Are there
too few designers born and not enough made? Do we all
just get burned out from long arguments with