Too late in my working life to have any effect on my work, I took a class from Richard I Anderson, a survey of user-centered design and usability research, which at the time were relatively new. Designers were relying on their own instincts or copying from others who dominated the market, and more often than not Computer Science curriculum never included the possibility that we were making our users’ lives more difficult by imposing our views on them of how they should interact with our creations. To make matters worse, our employers insulated departments from each other, and conflicts would arise about “who owns the user.” Was it the industrial designer, hired by Marketeers to entice consumers to buy the product, or the Engineer who applied their techniques to the best of their knowledge? I was neither of them, relying mostly on intuition (not really great either), and never being able to impose my views (I came to specialize in fixing other people’s software because I could take it home and rewrite it with clarity, finding bugs in the process).

Many of us are in the position of designing something without the help from a multi-disciplinary team, which functions best when there is intense collaboration and respect for each other. In fact, I would extend the “designing” to many small things that we don’t think as design. Just the positioning of furniture in a shared space should be done in a collaborative way with the people living in the space, for example. If you observe that your roommate continuously reaches for two distant cupboards for a routine kitchen task, it sounds like you are usability testing and on the way to redesigning what goes where in the kitchen. If people make a trail on the grass because they found it to be a worthy shortcut, they provided you with information that you can use for the design of walkways (it’s both a usability test and an input into user-centered design).

So, yes, my take-away from Richard’s class was not that I could become an expert designer, or a usability engineer. It was that I could start opening my senses to observe how people do things, and to interact with them to figure out how new things can be integrated into their lives.

In future posts, I will try to identify issues that I encounter, and talk about ways to improve them.