Risk and Cognition by Jean-Marc Mercantini & Colette Faucher

Author:Jean-Marc Mercantini & Colette Faucher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg

5.5 Involving the User in Design

The key concept in UCD is that the design of the artefact should assimilate the needs, wants, and limitations of the (intended) user. Katz-Haas [66, pp. 12–13] defined UCD as a “philosophy and a process […] that places the person (as opposed to the ‘thing’) at the centre; it is a process that focuses on cognitive factors (such as perception, memory, learning, problem-solving, etc.) as they come into play during peoples’ interactions with things”. The problem of this rather open-ended definition and other similar definitions (e.g. [67]) is that it is difficult to determine which of these cognitive factors need to be considered in the design of an artefact. If one succeeds in selecting the appropriate cognitive factors, the next problem becomes the determination of the extent of sufficient consideration of the cognitive factor to inform the design of the artefact adequately. That is, how much of the cognitive factor needs to be understood in order to decide whether this understanding is sufficient for current purposes?

In this respect it is important to reiterate the design goal of the artefact: it should enable the user (or users in the case of artefacts aimed at collaboration, such as video conferencing) of that artefact to realise some goal that needs to be achieved. It is important to have a clear understanding of these goals, as without them it would be near impossible to find out a priori whether a specific design of an artefact actually enables a user to realise their goal(s). There are some proposals that seem to forego this important consideration and instead focus on epistemological issues (i.e. ecological approaches e.g. [68, 69]), of humans operating in an environment in which they find themselves when they are conducting tasks. According to this conception, objectivity needs to be avoided as it precludes an understanding of the “subjectivity of an agent as a prerequisite for his construction of the objective world in a communicative interaction with it” [68, p. 16]. This, however, leads to a very relativistic approach to the study of design, which even calls into question the whole enterprise of it. That is, if you cannot infer certain design requirements from the observation of humans conducting a task, which is what these ecological approaches seem to argue, then why bother designing products for large groups of people. In other words, specifying design requirements necessitates objectifying some aspects of the task praxis in order to inform designers what they should include in the product or to facilitate its use.

Despite the pragmatic advantages of a UCD approach, the philosophy is not universally accepted. For instance, Phibes [70] noted that such an approach merely leads to systems being designed to fulfil the whimsical needs of the individual. Consequently, he indicated that the UCD concept is frequently used in such a way as to be devoid of meaning, and would be better discarded. The argument here appears not to be against the principles of UCD, but the way in which they are implemented.

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