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3.07.11
Usability and design thinking
Last week I attended an event labelled around “design thinking”. In one of the talks, usability was presented as an essential part of product/service design. However, the entire speech I was wondering what this “testing” attitude has to do with design thinking; why, at least, didn´t he talk about “interaction-design”? What has checking design artefacts (products, interfaces, etc.) to do with a design-oriented approach towards innovation? It may be part of it (at a later stage in the process), but certainly this is not the core of the idea.
Klaus Krippendorkff’s Trajectory of Artificiality may be an interesting starting point to make the connection between design and interaction. When he writes about designing interfaces (a core topic for usability), Krippendorf establishes several criteria for design: (1) interactivity, (2) understandability, (3) (re)configurability, and (4) adaptability. In his own words“The crown of such one-user-at-a-time interfaces is (the idea of) virtual reality.”
This is clearly another starting point, as this process has to start with “design research”: what means redesignability for users? what are the users´ habits? how can these routines be supported by a reconfigurable interface? etc.
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