Protect and Appreciate Notes on the Justification of User Centred Design

Introduction " We have a process to use users… " – Anonymous employee of a global ICT company The design community's lack of attention and commitment to genuine human and ecological needs has been repeatedly recognised and criticized (e. In the middle of this ignorance, however, there are pockets of design whose foundations lie in respecting users' needs and which seriously aim at increasing sustainable value for individuals and/or society. One of the candidates for this role is User-Centered Design (UCD). The phrase and its definitions (see below) promise a fast commitment to delivering something valuable for users and satisfying their needs, but can we take the promise as real? Perhaps UCD practitioners, like the anonymous one quoted above, are just using users to achieve the aims of their organizations? In this article I question and discuss the commitment of UCD to satisfying user populations' needs. The discussion focuses on UCD community's aims and conceptions of its work and the people with whom it collaborates. The idea of fundamental need is applied as a vehicle to discuss the fairness of the user-designer relationship. Donald Norman and Stephen Draper introduced the term user-centered design in the title of their 1986 book User-Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction. Gould and Lewis' (1985) article " Design for usability " is also an often-mentioned early reference to UCD principles, discussing early and continuous contact with users, quantitative usability criteria and evaluations, and iterative design. The Usability Professionals' Association [UPA] (2008) defines UCD as " an approach to design that grounds the process in information about the people who will use the product. UCD processes focus on users through the planning, design and development of a product. " In this article, UCD is regarded as a broad umbrella covering several approaches that are perhaps partly conflicting in their foundations and beliefs, but which follow the generic UPA principles. These include human factors and ergonomics, journal content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. By virtue of their appearance in this open-access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial settings. This article discusses whether User-Centered Design (UCD) can earn its ethical justification by satisfying users' fundamental needs. At face value, UCD is the advocate of the user in product development, but do its practices and values address what is fundamentally important …

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