User-Centered Organizations? Are We Making Progress, Yet?

How many times have you heard/said this refrain?

“If only they (we) could be involved at the start of a project, their voices (our voices)�and the customers they (we) wish to serve�would have a greater impact on the type of products and services that ultimately get produced. “

In Designing Customer-Centered Organizations, John Zapolski and Jared Braiterman suggest a strategy for applying user-centered design principles to business strategy. Their advice is simple and makes sense:

“True product innovation requires a radical rethinking of our roles as researchers and designers. Smart companies will gradually adopt early stage consideration of usage and users, with innovations in specific products and, more importantly, sets of products. To accelerate innovation, we must go beyond project-by-project improvements and employ many of our existing skills and methods to create customer-centered organizations. Rather than focusing on products, our impact can be greatest when we become advocates for developing organizational capital, the ability of companies to maximize the value of their investments in technology and ultimately their impact on the customers they wish to serve.”

“To create innovative and useful products, our most common approaches are insufficient. We must be ready to sacrifice traditional style guides and a fixation on formal concerns that promote surface consistency and instead strive for new frameworks that ensure consistency of user experience. Rather than see usability, design, and product management as separated by a rigid wall akin to the division of church and state, we must pool our skills in a common pursuit of outstanding products. Rather than transfer blame for failure to business people’s bad decisions and failures to listen to us, we must take responsibility for better communication to decision-makers and for the ultimate success or failure of our products and companies.”

Filed under: Usability