I don’t think I disagree with what you are saying, but I’m baffled by your close association between UCD and personas and UCD and user research in general (in your previous post on the subject of UCD).

UCD and personas have virtually nothing in common. Most obviously, the UCD process was around for a couple decades before personas were a glimmer in Alan Cooper’s eye. Personas are just a deliverable type. And if forced to associate personas with a process, it wouldn’t be UCD, it would be ACD.

Second, I think your dissatisfaction with user research is warranted, but I suspect that your experience is working in domains where understanding the users and stakeholders is either a) easy, or b) irrelevant to producing a good design. In my domain (enterprise middleware), this is not the case… at all. We have dozens of fundamentally different types of users, each with different skillsets and goals, each interacting with each other through specific collateral… and to make it worse there’s a lot of variability in these roles and how they interact across different enterprises. Simply understanding the boundaries - where does one user stop working and another start working? - is incredibly difficult. And it’s not up to us to define the boundaries because one of the value propositions in enterprise middleware is to integrate into your existing systems and processes (no rip and replace).

No designer, however great, can intuit this.

But just because effort is placed to understand this customer segment via user research doesn’t mean the UCD process is being followed. Any successful design process is this domain is going to start by learning some basics about the users.

Is the “UCD process” worth saving? I’m don’t think I care much about the answer to that. But whatever the answer is, it’s orthogonal in my opinion to whether there’s value in personas or user research.

Thanks for your comments, Terry.

Your experiences have differed greatly from mine. Most of the interaction designers I’ve met and have talked to consider personas and user research a key part of UCD. Also worth noting is that few of them seem to consider UCD as a “process”. It’s most often referred to as an “approach” or as a philosophy, as I discussed in this post.

To your point about user research, I wonder if you’re not misunderstanding my point about ACD. When you focus on activities, the research is on that and not on specific user types. In your organization, for example, instead of focusing on all those different user types, you’d focus on the activities to be performed and supported by the application, and design for those, regardless of who needs to perform them.

Again, yes, this can mean including users in your research to understand how they perform those activities, but in this case, it means taking the focus away from audience idiosyncrasies and instead focusing on how users perform a whole activity. In doing this, you can very often design something that works for a wider range of audiences and in more flexible ways than a UCD approach might typically yield.

Thanks again for the insightful comment.

As is often the case in these discussions, I think we’re just having a terminology debate. “User research”, in my opinion, is primarily about gathering information about activities. We don’t just ask people what activities they perform, we ask them what triggers an activity? What collateral do they receive and from whom? What is their deliverable and to whom do they deliver it? Etc. These are fundamental parts of user research. If someone on my team did some user research and reported back, “The first person I talked to, Bill, has long brown hair that he pulls back into a pony tail except when he’s riding his Harley on weekends when the weather is nice…” I’d fall off my chair… and then be tempted to throw the chair at the researcher.

But my point is this — if someone told me that my team was not doing UCD because our research was focused on activities and not “users”, I’d roll my eyes and conclude that that definition of UCD is so constrained that it’s not useful. Understanding activities is part of understanding users, not a separate thing.

That’s a great way to think about and treat user research, Terry, and I agree that “user research” in general should include a huge focus on the activities users perform.

That said, user research is usually much more focused on the user’s goals, wishes, desires, etc.—and not on the activities they perform. And that’s the stumbling point. What good is it to know that Jenny has 2 kids and is a part-time nurse practitioner who wants a pay raise to fund a vacation if what you really need to know is her process for managing patient records so you can design a faster and more accurate way to do it online? Your goal as a designer is to improve the experience, so of course you want to make it faster and more accurate.

Too often, the persona descriptions I’ve seen come out of a user research effort ultimately just tell me that people are busy and they would like your app to be simple and understandable to they can get through it easily and get on with their lives.

Not much of a revelation for all the money that goes into user research.

Focus on their activities, and you get much more meaningful results.