Designing for or with?

For months now, I have been telling a story of research success like this;

"In my most recent role, I was a Senior UX/UI Designer innovating on the Insurance Claims Process. When I came onto the team, a friend in the Engineering department shared that they understood Design as 'making things look pretty.' I wanted to discover why we were not conducting research. 'Well Angela,' my CTO explained, 'we’ve tried that already. We asked our users what they wanted us to do, and all we got was conflicting answers and confusion.' I replied, 'Well, in UX we often quote Henry Ford by saying, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses’. It’s not their job to ideate. We’ve got some brilliant minds here. Let us watch what our users are doing, and then we can ideate innovative solutions for them.''"

The truth is that there’s a lot of my own ego in this story, and there’s an important part of the story I left out - the crucial collaboration I was gifted by the people we were designing for.

They were doing the job every day, and had skills in their field I couldn’t know. They were acutely aware of the problems they were having, and they had great ideas. My contribution was to listen, have empathy, bring their amazing ideas together into a cohesive, feasible, viable possibility, and innovate on that resource. Without their expertise in their own lives and the systems that they use, I would have had nothing to work with.

We are reminded as designers that users say one thing and do another, that it's important to observe them and then ideate design solutions around what they actually do. I understand the statement. I've seen the disconnect between saying and doing in my own research, and my own behavior as a human.

This, like many stories, is a story of balance. In InVision's recent DesignBetter.co podcast with Nancy Douyon, Nancy recalls how well-meaning US citizens attempted to assist Haitians after the earthquake without ever knowing what they actually needed most. People were attempting to deliver clothing when there were no homes to store them in, while clean water to drink was a much higher priority.

I think the question comes down to two possibilities. (1) One is a reality in which we listen with respect and autonomy, and also observe what’s not being said, doing our best to be cognizant of our own biases. (2) The other is when we consider ourselves detached observers of distant users, superior in all ways of design and innovation. Our products are colonial in their inception. The means don’t justify the ends.