I have always struggled with the discord between creative design and user centred design.
I went to design school and learned colour, form, typography, layout, flow and how use visuals to capture the imagination of the audience. Over the years working in tech it got hammered out of me because software was built by engineers, then after a while it was designed by researchers. My problem is that empirical always trumped creativity and there is room for both, not one hiding behind the other. Yes, UCD is creative in the problem solving side of things and this is extremely important but the creative is devalued unless it’s championed by a visionary. That so many UXers have a creative and visual design background is important to note, a dirty secret that I think needs to be aired. We do, and we are good at what we do and we can make up well considered stuff in the absence of research and its ok.
Until now I couldn’t quite articulate the creative value of design in technology, usually falling back on feeling left behind, misunderstood or just some hand wavy “some of us have intuitive skills” (intuition being highly refined skills crafted after years of experience).
This was really causing me a serious amount of professional and then also, personal depression. I kept upping my workload, hoping I’d find that missing spark in the next job – that moment when you hear the brief and get really excited about the potential – but of course, with even less time to do anything, it just got worse and worse. Also, working in a scientific research company, it’s really hard to communicate any kind of user research unless it’s published or attached to PhD. My attempts at talking their language fell on hard ground and I found that leveraging creativity got me way more traction.
So I dropped a whole bunch of projects to focus on one large one (as well as manage and grow a design team).
Meanwhile…
A weird series of events occurred. Sitting in my department director’s office, where I have sat many days each week, in the same chair, I spotted for the first time “Design Driven Innovation” by Roberto Verganti, and asked to borrow it. “Yes!” he said, “Tell me what you think, I dunno about it.”
I started reading it, and after just the first chapter it all clicked totally into place. I finally felt permission to be the creative leaning UX designer I am, using UCD activities as well. I felt validated that I deep think, work immersively and reframe, and because there is precedent for it. I only have to adjust my skills slightly, not re-learn extensively and can now refer to an established document to back up my approaches.
A few days later, the head of the Machine Learning research group who is very encouraging of UX and who graciously shares his ideas with me sent me an email suggesting I read a book, which he had found an electronic copy of and attached for me. Same book.
Late that week, I was involved in an experimental workshop, hosted at our lab which challenged (successfully, I’ll add) the traditional way Government will develop a particular digital solution. After the first day I went home and decided to step away from the entire days work and think about the “meaning” of the work we were doing. How humans as community and messy creatures might handle the issue in an non-technical way. How geographical information and community updates are linked, and how to get away from bureaucratic procedure and the feeling of surveillance by “big brother” governmental mindsets. (Unfortunately I can’t share the details in full.)
I pitched the idea to the organisers and the next day we created a splinter group to examine and create a pitch for the new idea. The reframing and alignment of human meaning to an incredibly boring and laborious task was immediately taken up with excitement when I presented it to the senior executives in the room and created quite a buzz around the potential. The preceding two solutions also pitched which we had all worked on and while they were extremely well considered and quite achievable, they were met with challenging questions and a bit less enthusiasm.
I’ve used this approach many times, not knowing there was a name for it in most of my work and the times it’s failed is when I am unfamiliar with the domain, when I’ve relied too much on asking user’s what they want/need and when I am unclear of the meaningfulness and hoped someone could provide this for me (either as their vision or from research). When I redesigned iView, in 2010, I used this approached. It tested well and had incredible uptake. (Since then it has been redesigned).
Approaching digital solutions with mindset of an artist is really freeing. It is why in my hiring and building out the UX team at NICTA that I look for people who have non-performance type creative and artistic pursuits outside of work. Ego can get in the way of performance artists, while solo creative pursuits are more suited to deep thinking and exploration.
In deep research driven tech, I find the best starting point is examining and structuring a proposed workflow that makes sense using the tech and data; then observe the actual operators and beneficiaries of the current tech workflow practices and tool chains. From there we can “imagineer” potential solutions to then test against. Because it’s really hard to interview users about what they want and/or need in emerging, deliberately disruptive tech. They respond with conventional mindsets and speak in conventional solutions. I think this can “dumb down” the final results which as we all know suffer enough compromises as it is. Using a design driven approach frees up the the limitations and steps back to behavioural observations.
This now leads back to software no longer being a tool but an ecosystem. Read more here: Software Isn’t A Tool
