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4 Comments

  1. Gultekin
    21st August 2015 @ 3:46 pm

    Interesting point of view. May be it is just the style that it makes it a bit harsh. But I do not see user-centric design as user designed. In the end users knew what they wanted, they wanted speed in Ford’s case. Today’s digital world we can mostly identify needs under speed, security and enjoyment. But if we can not look at these from the context of user we will most likely design products that are bound to fail. An example I can think of is the choosing next track or shuffle with shake input and don’t design a disable option for people who wants to listen music while jogging. Actually most of the time, people feel they look ridiculous to shake their phones just to change track.

    • Neil Turner
      24th August 2015 @ 8:13 am

      Hi Gultekin, I’ve found in my experience it not so much about what users want, it’s about what they need. In your example I’m sure that if you asked lots of users if they’d like to be able to change tracks by shaking their music player they’d have said yes, that would be cool. As you pointed out, understanding users and their context would have highlighted the potential problem with a feature such as this when someone goes out jogging. And yes users might have asked for faster horses, but actually what they needed was not only speed, but greater flexibility, reliability and so on.

  2. crmnigeria
    11th December 2015 @ 3:33 pm

    I strongly believe businesses should be done from customers’ perspective. Have you not heard about the word customer, segmentation, profiling and modelling. Its all boils down to the customer. They know what is good for them and they can identify it when they see one.

    • Neil Turner
      11th December 2015 @ 7:41 pm

      Yes, good business boils down to the customer, but I don’t believe that customers necessarily know what is good for them (hence the article). The article is not saying that customer segmentation, profiling and modelling etc… are not all good ideas, just that simply expecting your customers to tell you the path to go down is the wrong approach.

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