My design hero is Don Norman. Always has been since User-Centered System Design, through the Psychology of Everyday Things to Emotional Design. Don moves the times, he doesn’t move with the times, note, he moves the times, he changes the way people think. Contrast this with Jakob Neilsen who just bangs on about the same old stuff. But The Don he moves on, and makes the world all shift about.

He recently wrote a piece called Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful in Interactions and posted it to his site. This article has been highly controversial within the community and lots of rattles have been cast out of prams. His main point is that human-centered design has become so dominant that it is not now criticised, and he puts another paradigm in its place - Activity Centered Design.

Now it would be dumb of me to precis this article. Go read it and agree or disagree as you see fit. What do I think? Well, I agree with the premise, and I warm strongly to the idea that ‘an activity’ is a base unit rather than a ‘task’. Task based usability taken to extreme is just ‘Operations and Methods’ for the 21st Century, and is the foundation for the idea of Usability as Behaviorism.

So its worth a read just because it’s The Don at it again, but I’ve warmed to a particular point - that ‘Vision’ is important, and that a dictatorial point of view creates good design:

Sometimes what is needed is a design dictator who says, “Ignore what users say: I know what’s best for them.” … [This] can produce horror stories, unless the person in charge has a clear vision for the product, what I have called the “Conceptual Model.” The person in charge must follow that vision and not be afraid to ignore findings. Yes, listen to customers, but don’t always do what they say.

Remind you of something? Yes! You read something similar here first in The Vision of Good User Experience … from yours truly published in the Interactions the month previously:

What I have found is that the most important contributor to the design of a successful user experience is a leader with a vision…The leader sees the big picture and combines and synthesizes, adding individuals with skill and knowledge in the right places to contribute to the vision. The leader’s critically important role is the vision, and holding tight onto it.

I feel I’ve got The Nod from The Don on this one. What we need to design good experiences is the vision, a model and maybe a little nerve.

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