About listening

Image courtesy of the Human Computer Interaction Lab

I was bored yesterday, so I decided to watch an episode of the apprentice that I recorded eariler. While I liked only the first season of the show, I kept watching it every season because it gave clear insights on how you can do great deal of work with brilliant people, and still fail and get sent home.
What was very interesting about this episode is the way the corporate team beat the creative team on a pure creative task. The corporate team “Primarius” recognized that they cannot beat the creative team “Matchstick” by themselves on this task, they brought the most creative team to their side: Customers. Primarius went and invited children to come and spend sometime with them and give early feedback about their prototype. (The task was to redesign a children’s book to fit nowadays urban life). The children gave their feedback and comments, and the corporate team went back and made the changes, got their product and beat the creative team.
Their task reminded me of the work done at the Human Computer Interaction Lab at the university of Maryland: When the researchers at the lab decided to design and implement a Digital Library for Kids, they did not rely on their creative ability or assume they already know what the kids want. They invited the kids to come to the lab and design the library with them. The research team, led by Dr. Druin, worked closely with children for many months to ask them about how they want to read books online, and the resultsresult are impressive.
While customers may not always know what they want, they are very good at knowing what they don’t want. A product that is designed around the tasks that users perform every day has a better chance of winning than a product with many innovative features answering questions that customers never asked in the first place, or forcing them to adopt a new workflow. In HCI, this is called Task Centered Design, and it was the first lesson I was taught in graduate school: build your product with your audience.
Last week, Apple introducted Aperture. When I first saw it, I thought “great! Yet another image browser/editor…”. But after watching the video, I realized that it’s one of the most impressive ones to date. Apple recognized early enough one fact that is giving them slow but steady success in the consumer market: The workflow IS the interface.