Nielsen Norman Group and Northwestern University | norman@nngroup.com
For years I have been pondering the similarities and contradictions among the ways of coming up with new ideas for products. “Design research,” as this phase is called, offers a wide range of methods. The marketing community has long championed focus groups, surveys, and questionnaires, whereas the user-centered community favors observation, contextual analysis, and ethnography. Each method has its proponents and detractors.
I have also pondered the emphasis by most practitioners, abetted by many product-design courses, to invent novel products and services to fill the needs discovered through whatever form of design research the group practices. This pondering led to my “Filling Much-Needed Holes” column in the January + February 2008 issue of interactions, where I suggested that although many of our clever ethnographic and field methods are designed to find unmet needs, most are far better off if they stay unmet [ 1].
Where do new ideas come from? How should designers create, transform, innovate? Some assume that inspiration strikes suddenly in the night: Without warning insight strikes, and the inventor astounds all with a powerful,
innovative idea. Psychologists agree that this can happen, but they add the important caveat that chance favors the prepared mind. These insights usually follow a prolonged period of intensive thought and study of the problem.
Do we need formal observa-tional methods? When I talk to today’s foremost designers, most are scornful. At first, I was quite disturbed by this attitude: Why were they so dismissive of these methods? Was it just arrogance? The problem is, I found their work excellent; if they were arrogant, it was well deserved. But further interaction with them convinced me that they were experts at human-centered design, except that they did it informally, without the fuss and formality that we ascribe to the activities. Great designers are like great novelists: scrupulous observers of human behavior. Although they are scornful of formal methods, they themselves are expert practitioners of observation, and if you can corner them in a quiet room (or better yet, a noisy bar), they will brag about those abilities.
Moreover, the great inventions that have changed our lives did not come into being through our ethnographic methods: They preceded the
invention of these techniques. Think lightbulb, radio, automobile, telephone, television, home computer, cooking equipment, and for that matter, almost everything that we use on a daily basis.
Does this mean that we should ignore the formal methods? No, because great designers are rare. And all of us have seen the horrors that result when unskilled, unobservant designers, engineers, or programmers create their products. So what methods should those of us who are less skilled use?
I am not a fan of undirected, explorative ethnography. This is an excellent procedure for developing our scientific understanding of human behavior, but it is too diffuse for practical application. I prefer directed observation: Search out the workarounds, hacks, and clever improvisations of everyday life. That’s where the answers lie: someone else has already encountered the need, someone else has already hinted at a solution.
Nokia’s designers, the New York Times tells us, visited China and noticed people using the backlight from their mobile phones as a source of light, so they added a penlight to some of their phones [ 2].
[ 1] Norman, D. A. “Filling Much-needed Holes.” interactions 15, no. 1 (2008): 70– 71.
[ 2] Holson, Laura M. “Hoping to Make Phone Buyers Flip “ New York Times, 29 February, 2008. sec. C1, p. 8.
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