Designing for or with?

I was job hunting in January of 2020. In my first interview, I told a story of research success that went something like this;

"In my most recent role, I was a Senior UX/UI Designer innovating on the Insurance Claims Process. When I came onto the team, a friend in the Engineering department shared that they understood Design as 'making things look pretty.' I wanted to discover why we were not conducting research. 'Well Angela,' my CTO explained, 'we’ve tried that already. We asked our users what they wanted us to do, and all we got was conflicting answers and confusion.' I replied, 'Well, in UX we often quote Henry Ford by saying, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses’. It’s not their job to ideate. We’ve got some brilliant minds here. Let us watch what our users are doing, and then we can ideate innovative solutions for them.''"

The truth is that there’s a lot of my own ego in this story, and there’s an important part of the story I left out - the crucial collaboration I was gifted by the people we were designing for.

They were doing their job every day, and had skills in their field I couldn’t know. They were acutely aware of the problems they were having and had great ideas about how to fix them. Sure, the ideas sometimes involved workarounds based on the resources that were available to them, but to be honest, that often made them all the more innovative. My contribution was to listen, have empathy, bring their amazing ideas together into a cohesive, usable, feasible, and viable possibility, and innovate on that resource. Without their expertise in their own lives and the systems that they use, I would have had nothing to work with.

We were taught in the early years of Design Thinking that “users” say one thing and do another, that it's important to observe them and then ideate design solutions around what they actually do. I understand the intention. I've seen the disconnect between saying and doing in my own research, and my own behavior as a human.

This, like many stories, is a story of balance. A few days after I completed the interview in which I told this story, I was listening to InVision's DesignBetter.co podcast with Nancy Douyon. Nancy recalled how well-meaning US citizens attempted to assist Haitians after the earthquake without ever knowing what they needed most. For example, people attempted to deliver clothing when there were no homes to store it in, while clean water to drink was a much higher priority.

I think the question comes down to two possibilities.

(1) A reality in which we listen with respect and autonomy, and also observe what’s not being said, doing our best to be cognizant of our own biases.

(2) When we consider ourselves detached observers of distant users, superior in all ways of design and innovation.

In the latter, our products are colonial in their inception. The means don’t justify the ends. There tends to be massive waste in time and resources. In the former, our work has the potential to lead to solutions that create lasting change… or, like Tupac, at least spark the mind that will.