Some doubts about human-centered design | Hacker News Reader

Some doubts about human-centered design

jussipasanen.com

57 pointstobr20 comments

While I appreciate the overall critique, the author is really misrepresenting what HCD is by referring to it out of context, far beyond what is was originally meant for by its originator, Alan Cooper. As a thought experiment, try replacing 'HCD' with 'computers' in the article, and there is really no difference in how it reads. What this means is that HCD is a tool, and can be used for any purpose, good or bad, by those that wield the power. And by that phrase, I certainly am not referring to the designers, but those who have the capital and call the shots.

To look at it another way, I think the recent Boeing fiasco is a relevant case. It wasn't the engineers who designed the system that were to blame, it was management who corrupted the process towards their own ends. Ethics and the profit motive are difficult to balance, and that goes way beyond a designer's methodology.

Ethics and profit motive are easy to balance, justification takes a few paragraphs.

I see this author making a lot of strong cases against unethical business practices where human center design is involved, but it doesn't make the case well enough that human centered design itself is harmful. If anything it makes the case that vanilla anthropocentrism is. Am I missing a stronger connection?

Honestly, I don't get the point. Maybe I skimmed the article too fast?

> We follow an approach called Human Centred Design, which involves ‘the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process’.

Based on that definition, it seems like "Human Centered Design" is just a platitude.

More of a fig leaf. It's more like "Profit Centred Design Optimised to Extract Maximum Value from Human Users."

Genuine Human Centred Design would create and enhance communities of interest with broader and more humane motivations than corporate profit-seeking.

Unsurprisingly it's rare in corporate projects, and in small-developer projects that ape corporate attitudes.

But it does exist outside of them.

Where I disagree is the notion that design has to be one or the other. I suspect it's more like a continuum, with the worst dark patterns at one extreme, and various not-for-profit empowering and educational apps and projects at the other - the ideal HCD project being a UI/UX that models and encourages humane, "clean", mutually beneficial, and non-exploitative interactions in a way that users instantly feel comfortable with and want to use.

No, but there is some motivation built into the title.

HCD grew out of the fact that too many products were being designed by teams that seemed to give little thought to finding out about the people who would have to use them. (It's "User Centred Design" but realising that defining people as "Users" in the title has the awkward connotation of suggesting that a person's whole purpose in life is to use your product. Or even that your product will only affect the people who actively use it - whereas there are other stakeholders in the process who might only use it indirectly.)

Literally speaking, if you were to map out the activities in HCD / UCD, you wouldn't find the user at the centre. The design team interacts with the users, sets the activities, interprets the results, communicates with the other parts of the business, etc. From a cold analytical perspective, the design team still sits at the middle of that map. But they're supposed to have the person who has to use this (and the other stakeholders - other humans) at the centre of their thinking, and a set of activities and processes that help them find out more about them through the lens of the people they interact with. They are supposed to use various kinds of interaction with users to constantly refine hypotheses about how adding the product to the mix will affect things, so that it can shape how they think about the design.

It's Human Centred in a similar way to how Problem-Based Learning is problem-based. Most learning approaches will attempt to show you a problem at some stage, so it'd be easy to say it's just a platitude. But the idea in PBL is that the problems are the "big rocks" that go into the teaching design first, and the other activities in the process are designed to support them, rather than the problems being something small peppered in at the end just to verify that the learning happened.

I had this question too. My interpretation of the post was that human centered design is supposed to make experiences seamless to the user and reduce any friction. That accustoms users to expect a certain level of convenience with every product or service they use. That expectation of convenience and resistance of anything slightly inconvenient is what is causing mass consumerism, mistreatment of others, neglect for the bigger picture as a whole.

I tentatively agree with the sentiment. Negative consequences stemming from aversion to discomfort is a theme I've been noticing a lot in my personal life.

From my reading, the author is making a case that human-centric design is taking anthropocentrism and going further, because you're not only exploiting everything besides the human, but also anyone who isn't the user (citing the examples of the negative issues with AirBNB, Uber and super-fast delivery mechanisms like Amazon Prime).

The author doesn't tie the two points together very well at the end, but there's definitely a case being made.

But the design discipline has little bearing on the impact those companies are having - designers are not responsible for setting business direction, and there is no hint of how exactly anthropocentrism in design assists exploitation. You could make the case that it helps achieve scale, and hence enhance the effects - but 1) the impact would be there even with shitty UI, 2) this would apply to almost every other discipline, and I feel that's not where his argument was headed.

I can't help but ask if human centric design means anything at all given the objections and examples of the failings are outright contradictory to the thesis. An actual arguement against it would be if human centered design resulted in far worse performance to make it easy to understand - akin to using masses of factory workers manufacturing with hand drills because it is simpler to understand than a drill press.

The anthrocentrism arguement is downright painfully inane. The issue isn't that it improves things for humans but that it causes environmental damage!

To provide a biting but illustrative example toliet paper improves things for humans. Using live endangered sea birds as toliet paper wouldn't make things better for the environment but worse for both humans and the environment.

I think perhaps you've misunderstood the article. If I understand it correctly, human centered design as it is currently employed is only concerned with enabling transactions, whether it is Amazon's 1-click purchase button, or Uber making it easy to get a ride without trying to find a taxi. Negative externalities like Amazon and Uber causing increased traffic and pollution when its customers use their services.

The article makes the argument that it is the anthropocentricity of human centered design that allows these companies to completely ignore the impacts on the environment and, in the long run, ironically, on the humans the design is supposed to focus on. I think it is probably an unnecessary part of the argument, as capitalism itself is quite good at incentivizing companies to ignore pesky negative externalities as long as they can get away with it.

Sorry, I don't understand your example. Actually, toilet paper does not improve things for humans, other than the act of using it for its purpose (which if you have a bidet, you don't need toilet paper). Toilet paper causes a great deal of environmental damage, from destroying Canadian forests [1] to, of course, climate change. [2]

1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/01/canada-boreal-...

2. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/toilet-paper-enviro...

This almost feels like a Marxist critique of human centered design: while we all talk about the virtues of this design process, the real power lies only in the underlying economics. Virtue itself is a distraction that keeps us from engaging with the dispassionate mechanisms of profit that truly drive what does and does not exist.

That's a little over the top, and maybe the entire article is a little over the top, but it's also a useful perspective. Like many virtue-centered value systems, people try to bring these into business and then are frustrated when everyone says they care and yet nothing happens. On a personal level people DO care (even top executives!), but institutions have structures to insulate themselves from individual interests. Things like KPIs are there to keep individuals from accidentally projecting their own desires and sense of virtue onto the company.

If, despite all of this, you still wish to project your own desires onto the company, then it may be best to do so with a degree of cynicism. The article demonstrates such cynicism. It might additionally be useful to frame your own desires as subversive, to acknowledge that they are not prime motivators. Maybe they can be subordinate to the prime motivators of the company... but maybe not even that. Making the argument might itself be a form of subversive behavior.

economics is a virtue-centered value system, in fact it chooses the definition of value based on the politics of the economist.

In short, we humans seem to not completely like ourselves, or, rather, tend to see our own shortcomings. (Which is good.)

This is why a design that exploits human nature to the fullest also exploits the parts of the nature we don't like in ourselves but have trouble fighting, like greed, or laziness, or selfishness, etc.

So I suspect we'll see a rise of "ethical design", which pushes us to exercise our best qualities (as designers see them) and tries to downplay and suppress the worse qualities (again, based on the designers' view of ethics). Ironically, a conspicuous use of such ethical design could also be fueled by virtue signaling, a negative trait from the (designers') ethical standpoint.

“Build homes for people, not cars” gets me very excited, but I think this article asks us to add a couple more conscious variables — “build environmentally symbiotic and financially sustainable homes for people, not cars”.

Human is not the most important things in the universe. It is necessary to avoid the idea that it is the most important things in universe.

However, business is not the most important things in the universe either. Love of money is the root of all evil.

Also, it is not quite clear to me what "human centred design" is meaning, exactly.

I can also comment about the first paragraph: Much of the newer software isn't actually that good user interfaces design, and also omits stuff that is good to have, and if the user has not read the instructions then they may easily make a mistake that is their own mistake, I think. (I think the better design is you have enough ropes to hang yourself, and also a few more just in case. It should not stop the user to do a stupid thing because then it prevents a good thing from being done, also.)

Reality: revenue increase goals don't always align with revenue increase.

>We can no longer keep solving human problems at the expense of the living planet.

We can't? Watch us do it. I found the article rather weak. As long as behavior is not incentivised, we won't do it. Humans are simple, but not easy.

Was anyone else bothered by the persistent misspelling? I thought it was just the HN title, but it was throughout the entire article.

“centre” is the British English spelling of “center”.

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