of intentional errors inserted in Wikipedia showed they were removed in less than two minutes [ 2]. While errors in Wikipedia are easier to fix than errors within programs, the fast pace is still indicative of a greater trend.

Certainly, the longer cycles still exist for products heavy in industrial design. Early vehicle GPS systems cost thousands of dollars and relied on embedded media. The early systems couldn’t be upgraded as available data improved, making the navigation system look embarrassingly obsolete long before the vehicle body did. Even the agile and vaunted Apple still releases its hardware on annual cycles. But as more physical products have embedded software and auxiliary services, they can essentially become self-correcting as well. We’re beginning to see this trend extending to other devices: television receivers that “reset” themselves to receive new channels, GPS systems that learn “shortcut” routes from other drivers, and gaming systems that update and patch in new features.

But this quick iteration cycle is a threat to traditional usability in two ways: Deployment begins to trump testing, and upgrades begin to overrule design.

With such short development cycles, deployment can easily replace even the cheapest or most realistic testing. Beta tools that would have once lived only as paper prototypes can be introduced as rough “products” and then refined to find a wider audience. The beta prototype can simply be reworked until it is a marketplace success, without any formal usability or design. While this may not be the most efficient development method,

it often appears to be. Adding design tasks, usability tests, or contextual studies easily looks costly and unnecessary. While those tests could provide rich insight into why a service is failing for users or how it could be improved, that data is qualitative and formative. The pace of iteration reinforces an existing usability challenge: making a case for qualitative findings when tomes of quantitative data are available.

Second, the fast iteration cycles also reduce the focus on upfront design work—shifting the focus toward ongoing correction and revision. The lure of later revisions makes each individual deployment less crucial. Unpopular design and usability issues can be pushed off indefinitely to be part of a “big redesign” that never materializes. Usability annoyances can be ignored until they become entrenched parts of the product. If the system “works” on metrics that the owners care about, there is a decreasing pressure to “get it right.” Usability and design become add-on fixes or upgrades, rather than initial product drivers.

We need to make usability and design an integral part of the development process, at whatever rate it’s conducted. The speed of agile development and the constant deployment pressure must be embraced as an opportunity: for rich data, for iterative design cycles, and for immediate answers.

modifying, tweaking, adding, building, etc. This work was once limited to a small population of hackers, but is expanding to a larger segment of the user base. According to research on user-driven innovation, these adaptations can represent up to 40 percent of the market. The research also shows that while many of these modifications are small, their makers are often leading users. The user-driven innovations signal future trends or unmet needs in the broader market. This adaptation also causes the “double usability challenge.” First, the system must provide users a straightforward way to make changes (e.g., APIs, help files, parts libraries). The second challenge is guiding new users to make their “new products” usable as well, for their own use or potential customers.

The online multiplayer game World of Warcraft provides a great example of user-driven innovation with a low barrier to entry. Users download the main game, pay a subscription service, and can interact with other players through an online metaverse. Users develop their own collaborative experiences within the Wo W environment: joining guilds to team up with other players, choosing their character and style of play, and deciding their path through the game’s quests. A subset of highly engaged users also builds and maintains a complete infrastructure outside of Wo W to support their guild- and individual-game play. There are loot-tracking systems, project-management tools for planning large-scale events, and a myriad of UI modifications that enhance game play. These complex modifications are built, downloaded,

[ 2] Viergas, Watternberg, D. “Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with History Flow Visualizations.” Working Paper, CHI 2004, Vienna, Austria, 2004,

[ 3] von Hippel, E. Democratizing Innovation Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. 19-22.

May + June 2009

Users Can Design Their Own Products An ever-expanding base of users are repurposing or reimagining how their products are used by