(2017-10-22) Cooper Endless Battle Design Thinking Sprints

Alan Cooper: The Endless Battle

Prototyping-and-testing is one of the weakest and most expensive interaction design tools you can use. The reason why is simple: it comes after much programming has occurred.

There is nothing Generative about prototype-and-test. That is, it isn’t…design. HCI professionals gave engineers advice on how well their code was performing, and offered suggestions for improvement, but little more. It’s inherently post-facto.

The core tenet of all my work on interaction design is based on the simple notion that if you can identify the user (persona), and learn what they are trying to accomplish (JobsToBeDone), and why they want to accomplish it, you have all of the information necessary to generate a good design. And you can do it in advance of any engineering or coding. That’s why I call my approach “goal-directed.”

After many years licking its wounds on the sidelines, prototype-and-test is in remission and gaining currency around the world. Designers now have more powerful tools to create their own prototypes, and a trendy new name has emerged, “Design Thinking.”

You can think of prototype-and-test as institutionalized, professional, sanctioned “faster-horsing.”

When you create a prototype you expose yourself — and your users — to a myriad of cognitive illusions. There’s the sunk-cost fallacy, confirmation bias, recency and validity illusions, and countless others. The data you gather from your prototype-and-test is deeply compromised by its very Heisenbergian existence. Test subjects want to please, they want to help. When you give them an artifact, they will riff on it, regardless of its appropriateness.

Their solutions are attractive and clever, but are they good for the user? How can they even answer that question when they don’t even know who the user is? Few of the submissions even bother to mention the user.

Do we execute the boss’ vision, or do we advocate for the user’s goals? UXers are the kind of people who want to make others happy, and we’ve been willing to change the name of what we do to please others, but a side-effect of changing how we call ourselves is that we change how we behave. It’s easy to make your boss happy at the expense of the user.

In tech, the zeitgeist swings like a pendulum between diversity and consolidation. We had diversity (Divergence?) with interaction design, now we have consolidation (Convergence?) with prototype-and-test. Safer. Business always grows and flourishes in times of consolidation. Users always benefit in times of diversity.

Oct24: he's also not a fan of Design Sprints: If it’s called a “sprint” then it’s about hurrying up. In tech biz, once going fast is on the table, everything else falls off the table.