Quotes

“it’s not enough to get the design right, you’ve got to design the right thing”

Bill Buxton – Designing the future with the help of the past with Bill Buxton

More complete quote:

Problem-setting is basically, it’s not enough to get the design right, you’ve got to design the right thing. And so, if you just leap in and start building something where you’ve got a solution, you have no idea if that’s the best option. There might have been a better way and you didn’t take time because you are already behind schedule. But here’s the crazy thing. At the beginning of the product cycle, you have a small team just getting going. Your burn rate, in terms of what it’s costing you per week in terms of the project and that, is very, very low. So, what you then should be doing is thoroughly exploring a range of different alternatives. Problem-setting, part of that process is this notion of, you cannot give me one idea. You have to learn how to work quickly and give me multiples. That’s a technique for this whole issue of, how do you deal with the problem-setting? And by exploring the space first… oh, that’s the real problem… Put it this way. You have a bunch of people that talk about user-centered design. And they’ll say, you know, go talk to your users and they will tell you what to do. Okay. Would you go to a doctor where you walked in, and the doctor said, okay what’s wrong with you, what operation do you need and what drugs should I give you under what dose, right? And that’s how some people naively interpret user-centered design, is “listen to users.” And, no. I’m going to ask you all kinds of questions. But I’m going to take all of those as part of the information that helps me make a diagnosis. And so, where do we collect the symptoms to find out where the real problems are? You’re telling me this. I understand the situation. Now, I have to know enough about your industry to ask pertinent questions. And for me, that’s what the problem-setting is. The designer, the main equipment is to have that meta-knowledge. And that’s where the diverse interests come in, so how do you get that knowledge? But if you don’t even know that’s the kind of knowledge you need to get, you’re not even going to go looking for it.