Human-centered design in industry: Lessons from the trenches

The complexity of today’s interactive software systems makes their development challenging for both industry and research communities. There’s considerable debate among designers on how to create systems that provide a more valuable user experience (UX). Another point of contention is how to share successful development experiences and transform them into or integrate them with ready-to-use software engineering practices. The concept of usability emerged with the advent of interactive applications in the 1980s and has continued to evolve with technology. Today, human–computer interaction (HCI) researchers focus on designing for UX, which requires understanding user requirements from both pragmatic (system functionalities and interaction) and hedonic (aesthetics, emotions, and social involvement) points of view.1 Usability is an important aspect of UX, but the success of products like the iPod and iPhone shows that consumers often value appearance as much as functionality. Human-centered design (HCD)2 attempts to integrate these goals using an iterative process in which designers create and evaluate increasingly complex prototypes, possibly involving end users. However, there’s a gap between what academia proposes and what industry actually applies. Although several companies—especially those developing software products—have usability or UX departments, “the integration of usability engineering methods into software development life cycles is seldom realized in industrial settings.”3 The literature is full of articles arguing that this situation must change and suggesting new methodologies and techniques to optimize the impact of usability and UX on software products, but this isn’t enough. In past work with software companies, traditional methods such as online questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups were instrumental to understanding a company’s work practices and overcoming some obstacles to HCD adoption. However, in many cases these methods failed to persuade practitioners and managers to incorporate UX activities into their software development life cycle. We realized that actual integration of HCD requires a thorough analysis of a company’s current software development practices together with the practitioners, working with them from inside the company. Through this cooperation, HCD methods can be adapted to the organization’s particular resources and circumstances.