John Zimmerman, Shelley Evenson, and Jodi Forlizzi, of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, have presented a formal framework for discovering and extracting knowledge during the design process. ²³ This framework includes six core components, each building upon the previous and each requiring a unique set of skills and tools. These components are named Define, Discover, Synthesize, Construct, Refine, and Reflect, and are discussed below. ²⁴

Definition occurs in an effort to understand the problem space. Frequently, designers will receive a design brief that includes vocabulary or references to particular work already conducted. For example, a designer may be explicitly given the task of redesigning the interface of a printer, in order to make it easier to use or to take into account new functionality that has been developed. At this phase in the process, the designer's role is one of skeptical visionary—he is able to “feel” the outcome of the project, yet is often unsure of what exactly needs to be done at all. To objectify this feeling, the designer may explicitly list questions relating to the task: Does the interface need to be redesigned? Is the new functionality useful? Who are the stakeholders in the project? The designer attempts to understand wants and needs, and to balance political requirements with implied end user demands and business goals. The process of human-centered design relies heavily on modeling target users in an effort to create a prototypical audience for design. A model is a representation of a real thing, and a model of a user is a representation of a real person. A basic form of model that has been embraced by Interaction Designers and is created in the initial stages of a project is the Persona.

Author and designer Alan Cooper has defined Personas as the hypothetical individuals that take on the characteristics of real users. To create a Persona, one may simply “develop a precise description of our user and what he wishes to accomplish.”²⁵ This Persona seems to come to life during the development stages of a project, and gives all of the members of a design team a common goal to focus on: pleasing a demanding, albeit fake, individual. A Persona usually takes the form of several paragraphs of text, followed by images that illustrate lifestyle choices, brands, and other physical embodiments of values. This stereotyping is at once highly specific yet subtly generic. It attempts to capture individual nuances and peculiarities, yet blend these nuances into a single individual.

Creating a Persona that is believable is difficult. Charming this Persona into life is even harder. It is easy to inadvertently produce a shallow, superficial representation of a group of people, and this representation only serves to reinforce existing—and often inaccurate—stereotypes. But if one is able to create a good Persona, a description that is backed by actual research and that celebrates the unique qualities of the target audience, the value of the Persona as a method becomes dramatically clear. The Persona begins to become an active member of the design team, and questions can be answered not by asking “what would the user want” or “what does marketing require,” but instead, “What does Jill (our Persona) truly need?” If an engineer begins to ask these questions, he has, essentially, embraced the notion of designing for humanity rather than for technology.

It is important that the details of a Persona extend outside of the given “problem statement.” That is, when researching printers, a designer doesn't simply analyze Jill's printer. Instead, it becomes important to focus on and begin to understand other facets of Jill: her car, her food preferences, and the types of shows she watches on television. In fact, by modeling everything about Jill except her printer, the design team begins to paint a vivid picture of brand, style, and behavior which can be synthesized during interpretation.

It is also critical to remember that the Persona cannot be established on a whim. As the Persona creates an archetypical understanding of the target audience, all efforts should be made to ensure that it is backed by reality. Traditional user-research can, and should, inform the creation of the Persona.

One of the simplest yet most powerful tools available to Interaction Designers is the written word. Language affords a host of capabilities, including the act of persuasion and rich description. When used to organize information, the written word can be used to create narratives of use that explain the proper and expected use of a system. A good Persona is rich with detail and is thus predictable, in the same way that one can predict the actions of a friend or loved one. While these predictions may not be right all of the time, it is possible to anticipate with some degree of accuracy what an individual will do in a given situation. The accuracy improves over time—a long-term relationship provides intimate insight into how people approach problems or situations. The same is true for Personas. By “living” with these Personas, the designer can begin to predict what these hypothetical people will do in novel situations. These predictions can be used prior to a system ever existing, and can be used to create visionary and compelling rationales for new ideas. They can also be used to assist in understanding and revising existing systems, and to structure scenarios of use that articulate goals, tasks, and actions.

Engineers have formalized these scenarios and often refer to them as “Use Cases,” in an effort to relate these written descriptions to “Test Cases” (systematic bug testing to ensure a piece of code is operating correctly). A modeling language (UML) has emerged to help visualize these Use Cases in a diagrammatic format. Yet the formality of these methods is a peculiarity that is useful but not necessary. A written scan also be thought of as a narrative essay, as it provides narration through a particular situation. It is, however, most usefully thought of as a story of the above Persona using a product to achieve a goal. This presupposes that the product exists (it usually doesn't) and implies that the design team understands a great deal about what the Persona will want to do.

The use of scenario-based product development has several core benefits. Narrative allows designers to contemplate the more human side of their creations—rather than focusing on technology, narrative shifts the emphasis to one of creative learning, problem solving, or attaining a goal. As behavior exists in the fourth dimension, these scenarios become sketches of time. Industrial Designers and Graphic Designers can quickly explain the value of visual sketching in their design process: Sketching is a problem-solving tool, used not simply to visualize ideas but to actually discover and generate a large number of solutions to a problem.

In the same way, the act of building a scenario is useful as a generative tool for discovering new ideas. The scenario, quite simply, becomes the Interaction Designer's napkin sketch. In the same way that a drawing has specific attributes that contribute to its success (perspective, line weight, tone, content), a scenario too has several critical components that aid in comprehension.

First, a scenario needs to include a product and a person. In the early stages of Interaction Design development, the product may not actually exist yet. The scenario development is also a form of product development. The product may be thought of as an ambiguous shape or a piece of information space; it need not be concrete.

Next, a compelling story is created that includes precise detail, sensory awareness, and vivid descriptors. Precision implies an exacting, accurate, and well-defined point of view. When combined with detail, the audience receives a comprehensive and thorough verbal discussion. Sensory awareness adds issues of sight, sound, and touch; paints an image of a smell; and may include (in rare cases) issues of taste. Vivid descriptors create colorful and dramatic emotional responses. The elements present in a story include a plot, characters, a setting, a climax, and an ending. These are also the major elements in a movie or in a television show, and create the general formulaic essence of storytelling. Finally, the guiding principles of a compelling story include a point of view and the overarching goal of the story.

Explaining to your boss that you are going to require several weeks to write stories is a hard sell. Interaction Designers have developed various formalities associated with scenario writing in order to emphasize the business-relevance of their creations. These may include matrices with formal variables described (including Actors, Goals, Tasks, Benefits, and Supporting Functions), or more formal step-by-step breakdowns of tasks into task flow charts. The essence of these creations is, however, the same: to humanize a situation and illustrate a cohesive vision of product use over time.

After the definition phase, designers attempt to gather data relating to the given problem. The next step in the design process, Discovery, is often lacking in many corporations and consultancies due to tight budgets and poor understanding of the value presented by this phase. Discovery involves understanding wants and needs, and accumulating artifacts related to the defined opportunity. Traditional approaches to design emphasize aesthetic qualities related to craft, beauty, and form. The solution to a problem of design is judged based on emotional value, and the judgment—or critique—is often grounded in the field of fine art. Interaction Design, however, shifts the focus from the visual to the human. A design solution is judged based on the relevance to the individual who ultimately must use the creation. Central to understanding this principle is embracing a very simple idea, but an idea that dramatically refocuses the locus of attention during the act of creation. This idea is that The User Is Not Like Me. ²⁶

When embraced by designers, this core philosophy implies that consumers are unique, and that all members of the product development team hold a bias in the form of an expert blind spot. The more one knows about a topic, the more one forgets what it is like not to know. Expertise makes it nearly impossible to remember what it is like to be a novice.

To illustrate this point, consider an example. You are the designer working on a kiosk for a bus station. The kiosk will replace the need for constant assistance from on-staff personnel (thus saving a fair amount of money), and will allow riders to purchase tickets even during the “off hours.” Your work has been extensive, and in the process of development, you have become an expert on busses, kiosks, and interfaces relating to these walk-up-and-use systems. In the end, you feel you have designed a pretty great kiosk. It has a lot of features, and even allows the tracking of a complicated route with multiple destinations and layovers in various cities. The kiosk comes to fruition, and slowly finds a home in various southern cities.

Now consider Dana Jones, a single mother of two who has just been displaced by a large hurricane that hit the southern United States. Before the hurricane, Dana worked at a small hotel. She was in charge of the general office management, and was responsible for nearly all of the accounting and bill paying. Dana didn't go to college. She taught herself the relevant software programs, and while she doesn't understand all of the laws and regulations she needs to follow, she prides herself on making very few mistakes. She has no extended family. She managed, quite successfully, to locate a beautiful and affordable historic house for her two children, but it has been destroyed in the storm. She has no renter's insurance, and was living month to month prior to the disaster. Dana's credit cards are overextended and were destroyed in the hurricane, as was nearly everything else she owns. She doesn't know where she is going to take the kids. She's been told, however, that she needs to evacuate the city immediately, and the bus is the only affordable and immediate way out.

When Dana uses your interactive kiosk, what state of mind will she have? Will she be happy and easy going? Does she hope that the kiosk will be riddled with features, and that she will be able to map her route in a visual manner—zooming in on various landmarks along the way, and saving her route to a personal account?

The User Is Not Like Me. In Dana's particular situation, she is about as unlike you as you may ever wish. Are you responsible for the interaction Dana has, in her unlikely and unpredictable situation? In order to understand that The User Is Not Like Me, Interaction Designers practice a form of user research that draws heavily on the fields of Anthropology and the social sciences, yet encourages and emphasizes the richness of the individual over the demographic style of quantitative research commonly utilized by marketers.

Ethnography can be considered a qualitative description of the human social condition, based on fieldwork and observation. This human condition implies that social phenomenon occur within a culture, and exist when there is interaction between individuals. Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski is generally considered to be the first to embrace the notion of actually observing, in person, the interaction between individuals. During World War I, Malinowski observed the native culture of Papua by immersing himself in this island culture and documenting the results in the text Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Malinowski's methodology was unique in that he used firsthand observation to document and analyze daily occurrences—Malinowski can be thought of as the first to utilize participant observation as an anthropological technique. ²⁷

Participant observation is an important aspect of Interaction Design, as it formally acknowledges that a product does not exist in a rational and substantial way until it is considered by society. Simply producing a beautiful, useful, or cost-effective item does not guarantee success. The product needs to fit appropriately into the culture in which it is to be used and sold. This is a core distinction between design and fine art. While fine art may be appreciated in the eye of the beholder, the artwork can be considered successful upon creation (or when the artist deems it finished). The piece of artwork—and the artist—still creates a sense of dialogue with the user, but the dialogue is completely unconstrained. Conversely, design cannot truly be considered successful until the user considers it finished—on consumption. The dialogue has a much deeper set of constraints placed upon it, and good design will help the user engage in that conversation fluidly.

Ethnographic tools used by Interaction Designers attempt to understand what people do and why they do it. The first is easy to determine; the latter is tremendously difficult to discern. People have a very hard time explaining why they do the things they do, and human behavior often seems illogical when considered by an impartial observer. Therefore, interpretation—making meaning of gathered data—plays a critical role in translating research into valuable design criteria. This act of interpretation is one of the primary differences in skill between a designer and a marketer. Interpretation often requires a leap of faith (or an intuitive jump from one point to another), and while the designer (as artist) learns to trust this intuition, the marketer (as businessman) is frequently taught to doubt or ignore it. While the latter may end up with a more sound argument, the former may be in a better place to truly empathize with the target audience.

Most ethnographic tools are generally poor methods of determining if someone would buy a certain product, identifying how much someone would pay for a certain product, and understanding what color, texture, material, size, or shape to make a certain product. While tools like surveys or interviews can certainly ask questions relating to these details, people have a difficult time in estimating or remembering details related to this type of preference. Instead, ethnography helps designers identify problems with existing designs (understanding the nuances of product usage); understand how people work, play, and live; and identify why people do the things they do with a product, service, or system. A basic premise of anthropology is that context shapes a great deal of factors in society, and the same holds true when considering the “society” of the workplace or the home. One form of ethnography that emphasizes the importance of understanding work in its natural environment is called Contextual Inquiry.

A Contextual Inquiry is similar to an interview, but recognizes how heavily an awareness of the workplace conditions will affect and inform action. Ethnographers Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt have identified four key principles of Contextual Inquiry. ²⁸ These principles help emphasize that the User Is Not Like Me. The principles of focus, context, partnership, and interpretation allow the Interaction Designer to truly understand the hidden work structures—and hidden needs and desires—in a target audience.

Everyone has a point of view. The problem with a point of view is that it both reveals and conceals. When one approaches a problem with a particular direction already established, it is difficult to have an “open mind” to changes that may take place. However, the opposite is equally as difficult: Approaching a problem with a truly clean slate is nearly impossible. Focus is the acknowledged pre-set view of what is going to be addressed through the ethnographic inquiry. It gives the designers a central topic to attend to and a statement to rally around. This statement can be thought of as the focus statement, and is particularly relevant when trying to articulate the reason behind the research. A focus statement takes the conceptual approach of framing the inquiry.

For example, when conducting research intended to investigate and understand the various tools used in a print shop, any of the following foci may apply:

The statements become increasingly more specific, and this specificity will provide the design team with much more detailed information. However, this detail is at the expense of the larger, system wide view. Generating a focus statement, then, must be tied to a higher goal or a set of strategic project statements. These statements, often mandated by a client or an executive, can assist in the directional goals of research in context.

Context implies the interrelated conditions in which work occurs. This principle is the easiest to embrace on a theoretical level, but hardest to implement on a pragmatic level. To understand context, go to the place where work occurs: Go to the users, rather than bringing the users to you, and watch what they do as they conduct real work. So simple, yet so evasive!

Consider again the previous example: You are an Interaction Designer working on the development of a printer interface. You want to view context, in order to truly understand how people go about printing with their existing tools. This knowledge will give you good ideas of how people print, and also will provide insight into problems that exist with existing printers. Can you creep into a print shop and watch a designer go about her day? How can you be sure that she will be using the printer during the time you spend at the office—what if she chooses to sketch things by hand instead? And consider the amount of preparation required to get into that office for the one or two minutes of printing. Is it worth your time to travel all the way to the office, get your recording equipment set up, and wait for printing to occur—just to watch someone press a few buttons?

The answer is emphatically yes. It is worth your time, and it is tremendously difficult to rationalize why it is worth your time—especially to a skeptical manager who demands that you remain billable, and to a client who is, ultimately, billed. Context offers fodder for innovation. Hidden in the physical work space, in the users' words, and in the tools they use are the beautiful gems of knowledge that can create revolutionary, breakthrough products or simply fix existing, broken products. People do strange things—unexpected things—and being there to witness and record these minute and quick moments of humanity is simply invaluable to the product development process. These details trigger design insights, and the equally important rationale to back up design decisions to other members of the design team.

Once you have arrived in the physical context, or the environment where work is done, it may seem logical to remain quiet and observe the work as it occurs. Most people assume that they will disrupt the “natural” flow of work and wish to remain as unobtrusive as possible. As the goal of a Contextual Inquiry is to gather as much rich data as possible, it is important to reject this logic and become an active participant in the inquiry. This participation takes the form of partnership, and is likened to that of a master and apprentice in the days of guilds. An apprentice did not sit quietly and observe. He became engaged, and tried things, and questioned things, and assisted in the process. When observing people printing in a print shop, it is imperative to ask questions. “Why are you doing that? Is that what you expect to happen? What are you doing now? Can I try it?” Experience is a guide to better understand when to ask questions and when to remain quiet, but a master and apprentice relationship will allow an investigator to best understand the nuances of work and truly gain the confidence of the participant being observed.

Interpretation, or the assignment of meaning to fact, is a subjective form of synthesis. It is also the most critical part of the Contextual Inquiry process, and the portion of the process that is ignored with the most frequency. The probable reason this principle is tossed aside? Put bluntly, interpretation is difficult. To interpret data is to ask question after question, making assumption upon assumption, always getting towards the heart of the largest question of all: Why do people do the things they do? Interpretation occurs in context, but the critical interpretation often occurs back in the “lab”—in the design studio, while the designer is sketching or the engineer is building, or in a meeting where data is passed around in nicely printed binders. Interpretation is qualitative, and can be wrong. This makes for a difficult combination when trying to justify design decisions. However, interpretation is a creative form of synthesis, and provides a smooth and elegant transition between Discovery and the actual generative form of design. A strong interpretation session combining various techniques of data aggregation can yield tremendous results.

Frequently, interpretation occurs in the head of the designer. This “moment of epiphany” may be thought of in the shower or scrawled on the back of a napkin. The Interaction Designer understands the importance of structuring this interpretation into a repeatable and formal process, and a good Interaction Designer is able to communicate not only the pragmatic interpretation but also the necessity of interpretation.

Marketing frequently participates in the Discovery phase of a project. In many companies, Marketing will actually conduct the entire Discovery phase of a project before ever asking for assistance from Design. Thus, on the surface, Interaction Design and Marketing seem to have a great deal in common. Both fields are interested in human behavior. Both fields care about brand, and presentation, and understanding the value in human experience with products. The interpretation of gathered data, however, is dramatically different across disciplines. Marketing relies heavily on gathered opinions and generalizations that can be made across a demographic, while Interaction Design cares primarily about actual behavior (often of the few rather than the many).

A common data-gathering technique used by marketing firms has been the focus group. This method, combined with questionnaires and competitive analysis, creates the core set of tools used to gather opinions, wants, and needs from end users. A typical marketing firm may poll an Internet message board, a group of volunteers, or shoppers at the mall to find out their feelings about existing and novel products. This appears, on the surface, to be strongly user centered and to be a useful way of understanding purchasing trends. While the method can certainly be applied properly, it is also quite easy to misuse or misinterpret the results of a focus group.

A successful focus group depends on a successful moderator. This requires an individual who is unbiased, creative, has the capacity for empathy and can understand and gauge the direction and flow of conversation quickly—and adapt to unforeseen circumstances. This is a rare individual, and while many who hold an MBA may have several of these skills, few can claim the entire host of abilities. A focus group depends on a compelling and continual discussion among six to eight people—people who may share similar traits, but usually have never met each other before. In a group of this size, there will most likely be personality differences—some differences of the magnitude that can absolutely destroy the “value” of the entire experience. These differences may include vocal distinctions (some-one may simply be louder than the rest) or morale oppositions (people may get into conflict over root issues of ethics and proper behavior). Worst of all, however, is the apathetic focus group—the members whom are willing to be persuaded, pulled, and shaped by the rest of the group. In a situation like this, gathered data will not only be poor, it will frequently reflect the opposite of the truth, and it will most likely be thrown out during analysis.

Most important, poorly run focus groups will highlight hypothetical behavior. A naïve facilitator may ask questions pertaining to opinions, and encourage people to consider what they would do or would buy. In a hypothetical situation with fake money, people may be more willing to “purchase” anything—and would most likely pay a lot more in false currency than they would when their wallet is open. These hypothetical opinions rarely translate directly into behavior. ²⁹ Thus, the value of the data gathered from a focus group is entirely dependent on the ability of the moderator; perhaps those engaged in design activities are more capable of engaging users in this type of study than are marketers.

Ethnography performed during the Discovery phase of the design process should be user focused rather than competitively driven. A competitive analysis, or competitive product benchmarking, is a method used to understand the similarities and differences between products that have already been released. The outcome of this technique traditionally includes the creation of a competitive matrix of products, highlighting trends related to features and functions.

While this is a valuable tool for understanding strategic marketplace positioning, it is frequently performed instead of ethnography, user testing, needs analysis, or a more formal product evaluation. This is problematic for a number of reasons. First, the emphasis of the competitive analysis is placed on features, rather than goals. By collecting and analyzing similarities in feature sets, the design team has implicitly embraced extra functionality as a goal for design. The quantity and scope of features, however, are nearly irrelevant to the user, who cares about more conceptual issues such as goals, tasks, and activities.

An additional and larger implicit problem with relying solely on competitive product analysis, however, is the assumption that the features the competition has selected to include are the right features. The communication of product features and value throughout the production chain is so skewed within a company that comparing this value set across companies is a nearly useless exercise.

Consider the following anecdote as relayed to the author by a car dealer in Austin, Texas. A customer enters the dealership intent on purchasing a beige Ford Explorer. Ford has just sent the dealer a surplus of white Windstar minivans, and the dealer wants to move the inventory as quickly as possible, so the hard sell is on: “Wouldn't you prefer a nice white minivan instead?”

The customer reacts predictably: “Uhm, no, didn't you hear me? I want a Beige Explorer.”

The dealer offers the minivan again, but this time at a significant discount. After all, he knows he can still make a profit even when he drops below MSRP, and he needs to get those Windstars off the lot. The discount is so deep, in fact, that the customer begins to change his mind. If the salesman is good enough, that customer may actually leave with a brand new white Windstar.

Now consider what happens at the end of the month, when the dealer reports his numbers to Ford Motor Company. White minivans are selling really, really well. The conclusion that is drawn by Ford, proper? Build more white minivans!

The internal channel communication of distribution and sales is murky and convoluted within a particular company. If the design team simply looks at the competition's features with the intention of copying them, the entire product segment begins to include that irrationally specified feature. And, sure enough, soon after the anecdote above was relayed, out came more white minivans from all of the other major vehicle manufacturers. The car industry is rich with examples like this. Consider how quickly the trend towards enormous SUVs blanketed the market, or how the need to brand an engine (“hemi”) found its way through various companies. Thus, Discovery should be focused on understanding goals and tasks, rather than on features or functionality. Competitive analysis can be incredibly useful in understanding how competitors solved problems relating to user goals, and should be used in tandem with other techniques to emphasize these elements of design. The articulation of specific features will come later, and will be driven by user need rather than by the competitive offerings of other companies.

After Definition and Discovery, a designer begins an iterative cycle of Synthesis, Construction, and Refinement. These phases represent the most elusive and perhaps time-consuming aspects of the design process because they are the most dependent on experience, proliferation, and “talent.” These phases, while highly intellectual, also require the “designer's intuition” and frequently rely on rapid ideation sketching, additional narrative development, and mind mapping as a generative method of problem solving and concept development. The designer creates a mass of ideas, testing them and gathering feedback, all the while honing in on a particular solution. The notion that a design occurs over time begins to illustrate one of the key distinctions between art and design. While an artist may enjoy sudden bursts of inspiration, a designer works through both a convergent and a divergent thought process of ideation. ³⁰

Convergent thinking attempts to locate the best answer—the optimum solution to a given problem. Engineers frequently practice a convergent set of thinking that focuses heavily on the need for a fast solution, a correct solution, and a logical solution. Designers too use this method of thought to hone in on a solution that can easily be presented to other stakeholders involved in the product development cycle. A solution occurring from a convergent thought process implicitly has some sort of “evidence” that makes it appear to be a proper route to follow, and it is familiar or safe in its “correctness.” A good designer, however, balances convergent thinking with a healthy level of divergent thinking.

Divergent thought implies a great deal of risk. One must shift perspectives away from the safety of familiarity in order to explore what “could be.” Author Richard Buchanan discusses the importance of shifting “placements” in order to encourage and assist in the development of innovation in design. Buchanan explains that “innovation comes when the initial selection is repositioned at another point in the framework, raising new questions and ideas.”³¹ He describes how signs, things, actions, and thoughts can be considered in light of one another in an effort to build new and creative ideas. Consider designing a new thing, such as a chair. Now shift the placement to imagine that chair as an action, or a sign, or a thought. This divergence away from the norm—a chair as an object—makes for wildly creative ideas of a chair as a service, or sitting as a philosophy; the notion of these placements, and their ability to be shifted, is what Buchanan refers to as the “quasi-subject matter of design thinking, from which the designer fashions a working hypothesis suited to special circumstances.”

Divergent and Convergent thinking requires a mixture of analytical skills (logic, engineering, and the development of “appropriate solutions”) and creative skills (drawing, mapping, “blue sky thinking”). This mixture is a rare but required duality that must exist in a successful designer. A designer will sketch, and think, and diagram, and write—and do these things over and over, each time refining and pruning away the “wrong” ideas in order to find the “right” one (convergent thinking in action). But wrong and right as applied to design are impossibly finite and are obviously the incorrect words. A designer may reject an idea as being “less good,” as it does not fit well within the constrained design space, and may temporarily embrace a ridiculous idea that still fulfills the stated constraints or guidelines from the client. The constraints placed on the design are a mix of human, technical, and aesthetic boundaries. The difficulty lies in discerning the hidden constraints, which the process itself helps uncover, and balancing these with the more explicit constraints, often defined by a client or a business executive.

In order to understand if the various creations have succeeded, it is important to test them with real people—people who represent the target audience—and to test not only their appeal but also their comprehensibility. Think Aloud Protocol (also referred to as Talking Aloud or simply User Testing) is an evaluation technique commonly used to understand problems people have with software interfaces. It has roots, however, in a more subtle and important aspect of humanity: understanding how people solve problems.

People solve countless problems throughout the day. A problem need not be something as formal as a math equation. Consider the increasingly common problem of understanding how to use a cell phone to make a phone call. Understanding the various buttons, navigating the menus, and ultimately placing the call is a problem to be solved, and a method to understand how people approach problems of this kind would be of huge value to anyone in the business of shaping complicated user experiences.

Herb Simon, arguably the father of the field of artificial intelligence and a beautiful thinker, was also interested in how people solved problems, yet his goal was a bit more lofty than creating a cell phone. In order to create intelligent computer systems that may simulate or predict human behavior, one must first understand how human behavior itself works. Simon, along with Allen Newell, developed a series of experiments to understand issues of cognition and working and long-term memory. ³² Through these experiments, Newell and Simon determined that, among other things, people could articulate what they were doing, as they did it, without affecting the outcome of the task. That is, a person can attempt to dial a cell phone and explain what he is doing, as long as he is not prompted to explain why he is doing it. This running description of action—formally called a protocol—is, ultimately, an intimate look at the contents of the working memory in a participant. Evaluators can use this technique to understand what someone is doing, and can later interpret why that person did it. By understanding what people have done, designers can begin to understand when they have errors and can interpret, or create credible stories about these errors. Additionally, designers can understand the rationale behind actions by seeing them in totality. Actions will appear as a running set of steps in a task to achieve a goal. The protocol can be interpreted by designers, who can then contemplate the underlying behavior that occurred.

In order to successfully conduct a Think Aloud User Study, a designer requires a prototype, a participant, and a set of tasks. A prototype is a representation of the final product. The prototype can be of any fidelity. For example, if testing a piece of software, the prototype can either be a functioning and working version of the software or a simple set of hand-drawn screens. When testing physical products, the level of finish given to the testable model is relative to the complexity of a task.

Just as the prototype should be representative of the final design, so should the participant represent the end users of the creation. For example, when testing products intended for use in an industrial kitchen, it is worthwhile to find participants who spend a great deal of time in industrial kitchens and actually represent the target audience of the product. One way of approximating end users is to attempt to locate individuals who are similar to the Personas that have been previously developed.

A set of tasks will be given to the participant. These tasks attempt to engage the participant in actions that represent normal behavior when using a product, and should thus be structured around predictable and probable goals a user may have. Referencing the previously developed Personas and Scenarios makes sense when developing tasks for the Think Aloud User Study.

Once the prototype has been created, the participant has been recruited and the tasks have been established, running the study is straightforward. It is, in fact, so simple that it may seem too easy. The difficulty is not in the mechanics of the procedure, but in the interpretation and application of the results. The prototype is presented to the participant, and he is instructed to use it to accomplish the tasks. He is then asked to “think out loud” as he uses the prototype: He is to vocalize what he is doing throughout the task. If he falls silent, the facilitator will prompt him to continue talking, but will be unable to help him in any way. These instructions frequently become comical as participants realize that they are, truly, on their own. Once the rules for the study are established, and a sample “think out loud” is demonstrated, participants generally take to the technique quickly and only a little prompting is required to keep them continually verbal.

Less formal but still useful versions of the technique have evolved that focus more on moderator-led probing and less on simple vocalization of working memory. Moderators may ask questions like “Is that what you expected to happen?” or “You look confused—is there something on the screen that isn't what you expected?” in an effort to draw out reactions from participants. The value of any form of user testing is in the critical incidents that are recorded during the protocol: “By an incident is meant any observable human activity that is sufficiently complete in itself to permit inferences and predictions to be made about the person performing the act… To be critical, an incident must occur in a situation where the purpose or intent of the act seems fairly clear to the observer and where its consequences are sufficiently definite to leave little doubt concerning its effects.”³³ These incidents usually indicate design errors relating to navigation, cognitive structure, or labeling, and can be wonderful insights into the way people approach problems relating to designed interfaces and objects.

Perhaps even of more value than uncovering usability problems, however, is the direct manner in which these usability problems can be communicated to individuals in a position to effect positive change. Video of the user testing can be shown to engineers, project or product managers, marketers, or others involved in the development of a product. The reactions of real people serve to appropriately contextualize the designs that have been created. Rather than having debate or discussion about what could happen, this type of user study presents something that did happen.

The final step in the Interaction Process proposed by Zimmerman, Evenson, and Forlizzi focuses on Reflection—the act of assessing success. “Design researchers can examine their own process throughout the case and identify opportunities for increasing efficiency. Also, through the collection of reflections and summaries of many case studies, designers can begin to develop models that allow them to more accurately estimate both the time and resources needed for future projects.”³⁴

Unfortunately, this critical step is nearly always ignored by professional designers. Assessment implies internal criticism, something many companies prefer to leave up to public relations or external product reviews. The assessment must be at a user and project level, rather than a quality assurance level, and benchmarks for success have generally not been developed or acknowledged within corporate America. In many high-pressure design consultancies, to reflect means to waste time. Reflection is not productive, and is frequently viewed as a poor use of money and resources.

The process described above is very succinct and appears to be quite linear. In fact, process is elusive and messy, and a cohesive process frequently means a process of relative “unawareness” of structure. That is, there is rarely a definitive declaration of “beginning” or “ending” to any of the steps mentioned. Design is a creative field, and in order to successfully create, one must achieve a sense of Flow. ³⁵ Flow is, among other things, the absence of self-doubt and the nearly auto-telic and automatic creative process. Beginning students of design are painfully aware of their process. They reflect, and doubt, and self-criticize both their creations and their skills. They are like the gawky thirteen-year-old girl who has sprouted up too quickly, nearly a head taller than the rest of the kids and obviously slouching to fit in. To be so painfully aware of “deficiencies” causes others to notice and comment on these shortcomings as well. Malcolm Gladwell discusses the fragility of process in his text Blink, making the connection between the creative process (flow) and the sports process (in the zone): “…problems that require a flash of insight operate by different rules… as human beings, we are capable of extraordinary leaps of insight and instinct… all these abilities are incredibly fragile. Insight is not a light bulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.”³⁶ A mature designer respects and embraces the often ill-structured nature of the process, and—because he knows to expect messiness during the act of creation—he promptly forgets about it completely. Process becomes innate, and the phenomenon of design intuition takes over.

Design intuition is most likely not a genetic disposition to be creative. In the same way that one is not “predisposed” to be a doctor, or a lawyer, a designer must ultimately select a career path and hone the particular skills necessary to succeed in that path through a great deal of practice. What many refer to as “intuition,” then, is not the untaught or un-teachable, but instead, is a learned understanding and respect of process, molded by experience and refined over a great deal of time and practice. Designers may appear to work based on “intuition,” but the magical nature of an innate process carries little weight among engineers or business owners. Designers have learned to externalize and justify the above process along the way, in an effort to alleviate the pain that may come from explaining how a design “just feels right.”

A designer who trusts his intuition does not abandon the procedural set of pragmatic steps as outlined above. Instead, he learns to balance this process with two outside forces: confidence, and personal experience. Confidence allows the designer to form an opinion and then believe in it. This confidence is informed by personal experiences, experiences that rarely have anything to do with the subject matter of a given design problem. Philippe Starck, a French designer who has found his way into popular retail stores and thus into the lives of many Americans, has been one of the most vocal proponents of “intuitive design.” His confidence is obvious in the dramatic, and often amusing, style of his work—and the experiences from which he seems to draw have nothing to do with design, proper and instead frequently pertain to sex or the erotic nature of the human form.

Starck explains that as a designer, you “must have your own responsibility, your own consciousness… I work only with intuition.”³⁷ It is interesting, then, to see the highly charged results of such an intuitive approach—Starck lives passionately, feels passionately, and has thus been continually described as a “sellout” or a “playboy.” He may well be both things, but the dramatic success of his products at Target imply a sense of resonant emotional wonder with the audiences he is trying to reach.

Not all of the well-known and successful, or “high-profile” designers have embraced intuition in the process of design. Stefano Marzano, CEO and Chief Creative Director at Philips Design, has vocalized a near polar-opposite view of the role of designer. While Starck explains that “… there are already thousands of really, really good chairs. There are thousands of good lamps. There are thousands of everything… I am not interested in designers,” Marzano takes a much more refined and intellectual approach, and views a process-driven design methodology as a business differentiator. ³⁸ During a profound speech to the German Marketing Association Conference in Hamburg, Marzano explained that “… ‘arty’ product design, the sort of strikingly individual designs produced by Philippe Starck… may help provide differentiation for a while, but it is easily imitated and soon becomes a commodity.” Instead of relying on the artistic intuitive, Philips practices a user-centered design process that relies on researching “social, cultural and visual trends by various international institutes and universities” in order to help shape complicated experiences. ³⁹

One can ultimately consider the outspoken artist of Starck and the humble and subdued intellect of Marzano as having the same positive focus: a focus on people, and emotions, and on making the world a better place to live in. This may embrace the visual aesthetic and lead to the production of objects of visual beauty, or focus on the creation of products that save lives and increase the value of the human condition. Both designers, however, view the role of design as a human-centered, emotionally driven, complicated, and culturally relevant process of creation.

During the process of Design, various disciplines claim ownership at various times. In some larger companies, Designers frequently complain of the “over the wall” problem. Research is conducted by Marketing, and “thrown over the wall” to the Engineers. The Engineers build to the written specification, and over the wall it goes to the Designers. The Designers are left to do the plastics or push the pixels, and there is little communication or cohesion between disciplinary entities.

Philippe Starck designs a product as an individual, and while his products are sold in large companies like Target, his specific design consultancy is small. As a result, Starck generally enjoys making executive decisions spanning across design, marketing, engineering, and distribution. A designer at the larger entity of Philips, however, may be much more constrained to specific actions and may not have any input into issues tangentially related to design. In a development team made up of engineering, marketing, and design, each participant has a distinct role to play and the relationship forged by the various disciplines helps determine the relative success of the product.

The engineer may be responsible for the functionality of the product, and in the case of digital or electronic products, that functionality is frequently embedded in emerging technology. The engineer implicitly becomes the advocate for technology. While not necessarily proposing the latest technological advancements, the engineer remains responsible for making sure that a product is technically sound and that it functions correctly. Similarly, a marketing manager may be responsible for ensuring that a brand presents a consistent and compelling image. This may include understanding the target demographic as well as gaining an awareness of purchasing patterns and buying trends. A project manager may own the product development schedule, and be responsible for delivering the project as specified, on time and on budget. Each player in the development of a product has a primary focus.

The Interaction Designer, too, takes ownership of a particular area of expertise. While engineers may be advocates for function, and marketers for brand, the Interaction Designer becomes an advocate for humanity. This advocacy must occur on various levels of detail as a project progresses from a business goal into a tangible form.

At the beginning stages of a project, an idea may be driven solely by a business necessity: increasing profits, gaining brand equity, or disrupting a traditional channel leader. The Interaction Designer, if invited to discuss the project at this stage, may ask questions like “Does the user need this product at all?” This view might be informed by an understanding of culture, or an intricate care and love of society. It may, however, simply be a representation of viewing the world through a technologically-wary filter. This is, clearly, a philosophical question first; the “right” answer may be the “wrong” business suggestion, and Interaction Designers are rarely invited to discuss the project at this stage. This is unfortunate. If the process of Interaction Design is to be applied to the business processes themselves, Designers need to be firmly embedded in the upper echelons of the corporation, or have a strong relationship with those upper levels of management.

Further along in the process of product development, it may become apparent that particular elements of functionality are more difficult or expensive to implement. At this stage in the project, the Interaction Designer is responsible for forcing a dialogue of cost/benefit analysis from the perspective of the end user. How much contextual evidence is there for such an element of functionality? What is the value of a more expensive piece of technology, measured on a human scale, rather than a financial scale?

As a project nears completion, Interaction Designers are frequently called upon to consider the visual aesthetics of a solution. This detailed level of refinement gives the Interaction Designer a final chance to advocate for the end user—this time, on a purely emotional, or visual, level. In this way, Interaction Design often becomes synonymous with Interactive Design or Graphical User Interface (GUI) Design.

Interactive Design focuses on the development of interactive systems, placing technology at the center of attention and ultimately emphasizing authoring techniques. These authoring techniques frequently focus on the visual aesthetic of content presentation—the “eye candy” relating to interfaces. GUI Design takes a similar approach, emphasizing the nature of technological constraints and platform-specific paradigms. While these two disciplines certainly cater towards a user, they place a dramatic degree of emphasis on technology, and allow technical constraints to guide the development of interfaces. An Interaction Designer will most likely have skills related to Interactive Design or GUI Design, but these skills do not define his existence.

At the core of an interaction is the dialogue between a product, system, or service—and a person. Design exists as a means to a greater end—enhancing the human experience, solving complicated problems, and ultimately creating designs that resonate with their audience. Understanding that design work has direct consequences on people adds a unique, and humane, side to the elements present in the act of creation and dramatically shifts the focus of what could otherwise be thought of as technical artwork. At the heart of the Interaction Design process is a simple notion: that design should be user-centered, and that the only way to truly understand what users want is to interact with them. The process described attempts to capture what people do, think, say, and want so that a designer can create usable, useful, and desirable creations.