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Design, Usability, and Innovation
design, usability
April 18, 2004, 08:54 AM
A few weeks ago, I went to a talk given by Hugh Dubberly on models for design (Dan has a very nice summary, as usual). During the talk, Hugh made a point about design and innovation that's stuck with me; he remarked You don't get innovation from the design process. You get quality from the design process.
At the time, that struck me as quite true.
Since then, however, I've had second thoughts. Let's consider an "innovation" (an overloaded word) to refer to "some technology-related change that has a significant impact on the ways people behave, generally for the better". I think that captures it reasonably well for my current purposes. Usually when we think of innovations, we think of some brand new ideas that spark new technological developments, like televisions or automobiles. And its true that the design process won't get you these; great new ideas are elusive things and so far no one has found a process to repeatably elicit them (though there are some brainstorming techniques that can help).
But there are times when innovations are not spawned by brand new ideas. There are times when the innovation involves taking an existing technology and making it accessible to a new (probably wider) audience. Or in taking a technology that used to be complex and cumbersome to use and making it quick and simple. Suddenly, the technology is accessible and it becomes an innovation.
The GUI desktop metaphor is a classic example. Affordable computers were available before PARC's innovation got commercialized, but only hobbyists bought them, because they were just too tough for the average person to use. With a well-designed interface, however, personal computers became a reality and an innovation was born.
iChat AV is a more modern (if also more modest) example. Voice-over-IM has existed for a long time in AIM, but nobody used it. All Apple did was make it dead simple to use. Suddenly it becomes useful to the masses, and we have innovation.
Style sheets and the single-sourcing paradigm might be a design innovation waiting to happen. Style sheets are useful to some but inaccessible to most due to the complexity of dealing with the badly designed interfaces for creating and applying them. If someone were to create a more usable interface, we may have innovation.
This is, I believe, the role that design plays in innovation. Not in consistently generating world-changing ideas (these come from a multitude of disciplines) but in turning these ideas into something simple enough to affect the lives of thousands.
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