求是设计会

Travis Bowles的回帖

下文译文由任好好翻译（原文），任好好校对，得到陈文颖和皮珊帮助，在此表示感谢。版权声明：文章版权归译者与求是设计会共同所有，转载时请以超链接形式标明文章原始出处和作者信息。

一般认为，产品的创新有两条路：一条是以技术为主导的产品创新；另一条是以用户需求为主导的产品创新。新技术的出现并被适时且恰当地应用于新产品开发中，这点我们很容易理解。那么产品的用户呢？新技术的应用如果不能很好地满足用户的各种需求的话，也是毫无意义的。“以用户为中心的设计”，缩写UCD，我们并不陌生，但到底什么是UCD？大家对它的是如何理解？在产品创新领域成果显著的设计团队及设计师们又是如何看待UCD？以下这篇来自美国旧金山的专注于企业软件、创新性消费类电子产品和互联网界面可用性研究的Travis Bowles出说了他们理解。这篇文章是对Jens Martin Skibsted 和 Rasmus Bech Hansen发表在fastcodesign.com上的名为“用户引导的创新不能创造突破性的进步：只要问问苹果和宜家就够了”这篇文章的回应。（译者语）

Apple, UCD, and Innovation – A Guest Post by Travis Bowles

This guest post is in response to the article User-Led Innovation Can’t Create Breakthroughs: Just ask Apple and IKEA at fastcodesign.com

From the article:

One evening, well into the night, we asked some of our friends on the Apple design team about their view of user-centric design. Their answer? “It’s all bullshit and hot air created to sell consulting projects and to give insecure managers a false sense of security. At Apple, we don’t waste our time asking users, we build our brand through creating great products we believe people will love.”

苹果、UCD和创新—Travis Bowles的回帖

这篇帖子是对发表在fastcodesign.com上的“用户引导的创新不能创造突破性的进步：只要问问苹果和宜家就够了”这篇文章的回应。以下内容是摘自原文的部分内容：（全部原文http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663220/user-led-innovation-cant-create-breakthroughs-just-ask-apple-and-ikea）

一个如往常一样的夜晚，我们问一些在苹果设计团队中的朋友关于他们对‘以用户为中心的设计’的看法。他们的答案是什么呢？“这完全是有些人为了推销他们的咨询项目而编出来的毫无意义的东西，然而它也能让那些对设计没有信心的经理们心安理得。在苹果设计团队里，我们从来不浪费时间去问用户，我们通过创造那些我们认为用户肯定会喜欢的伟大的产品来构建我们的品牌。”

I’d argue that someone at Apple noticed how Microsoft had been building tablets since 2002 and hadn’t quite gained traction. Apple tends to step in and refine the work of others, often picking the perfect moment in time when the capabilities of a technology and users’ willingness to accept a technology intersect. The question of how they choose those moments is hotly debated – if it was more apparent to the world, their competition wouldn’t always be following them into the market, often AFTER pioneering the first generation of the market Apple dominates (see Microsoft with tablets, Creative Labs with the iPod, Xerox with GUIs).

我认为，其实苹果一直在关注微软从2002年就开始开发平板电脑且在发布后没有完全获得市场认可。苹果更倾向于在别人的产品的基础上进行优化，经常能在产品的技术性能与用户对技术的接受度上找到完美的结合点并挑选恰当的时间进入市场。关于苹果如何选择进入市场的时间点是被广泛争论的—如果对于这点世人皆知的话，苹果的竞争对手就不会总是采取跟进策略，而现在的情况是竞争对手总是在苹果率先进入市场并在市场上占有主导地位之后才进入市场。（看看微软的平板电脑、创新实验室的音乐播放器和施乐的图形界面就知道了）

I believe there is a common misunderstanding that User Centered Design(UCD) is asking users what they need and building it. If that were UCD, then we’d just let marketing and sales departments design products with the feature lists provided by customers and, in many cases, that would be a sufficient source of information to drive an evolutionary product design process. However, I would argue that proper full-spectrum user centered design *leads* to revolutionary product designs. The problem lies in the assumption that user centered design is building what the user thinks he/she wants.Jonathan Iveis fond of a quote from Henry Ford that I use in explaining the differences between customer feedback and user experience research – “If I had asked people what they needed, they would have said faster horses.” I think this sums up the Apple philosophy that they are creating things so new and cool that the future users wouldn’t even know what technologies were available, let alone be able to assemble them into new category of device. The mistake here is believing that the only tool available to the UCD practitioner is asking users “what should we build for you?”

我认为许多人对于“什么是UCD（以用户为中心的设计）？”这个问题存在一个共同的误解，许多人觉得UCD就是去问用户想要什么并以此开发产品。如果那就是UCD的话，只要让市场和销售部门的人按照用户提出的特征要求来设计产品就可以了，然而在许多时候，这种情况也成为推动一项革命性产品设计进程的必然的信息来源。然而，我还是认为恰当的全面的“以用户为中心的设计”引导革命性的产品的诞生。但这个问题要基于这样的前提： “以用户为中心的设计”是构建用户认为他们真正想要的东西。Jonathan Ive非常喜欢出自Henry Ford的一句话—“如果我问人们想要什么，他们会说是一匹更快的马”，在此我用它来解释用户反馈和用户体验研究之间的区别—我相信以此概括苹果的设计哲学，他们的设计哲学就是创造出的如此又新又酷的东西，以至于未来的消费者都不知道是它是哪类有效技术，只能将其单独归类为一个新的产品类别。在些我们对UCD的错误理解就在于认为UCD实践者唯一有效的工具就是问用户：“我们要为你开发什么样的产品？”

1910 Model T Ford, Salt Lake City, Utah

What Ive ignores is that, although Henry Ford didn’t rely on potential customers to define his product, he did learn about their needs and try to accommodate them. The original Model Ts were designed to run on ethanol for the benefit of farmers who could make their own fuel from the land (as they did for their horses), and they were designed for the simple servicing by owners in the field (as they did their other farm equipment), in contrast to some more expensive competitors. He didn’t ask his users to design his product but he informed his designs by learning about their environment, goals, and needs.On a smaller scale, I’ve seen failures of this sort during user testing, when some participants will offer direct design advice, proposing that you place this button here, add this feature there. A lot of researchers get frustrated and dismiss this sort of input, correctly asserting that the participant is not here to redesign the UI. I do, however, find follow-up questions on these design suggestions often produce interesting data points concerning user expectations, needs and even mental models of the system. I wonder sometimes if some designers and researchers overreact because they feel their value is undermined when they acknowledge any value in the ideas of potential users.

Jonathan Ive忽略了一点，尽管Henry Ford没有依靠潜在的顾客去定义他的产品，但他也了解了顾客的需求并试图去迎合他们。最初设计出来的福特T型车是以乙醇作为燃料的，农民从中受益非浅，他们可以从农田里生产出燃料来（他们也是以这种类似的方式养马的），而且车的设计很方便便使用者在地里检修（如同操作其它农具一样方便），完全不同于其它昂贵的同类产品。他没有让用户参与设计他的产品，但是他通过了解用户的使用环境、期望目标和需求来完善他的设计。在更小程度上，我已经看到过用户测试中的像这一类的失败案例，在测试过程中一些参与者会直接提供一些设计建议，建议你把这个按钮放在这里，在那里增加一个特功能。许多研究人员对此感到困惑并对这种入侵式的建议视而不见，明确地声明这位参与者不应该出现在这里对UI设计指手划脚。我也这么认为，但是，进一步去发现针对这些设计建议的问题非常重要，因为对这些问题思考经常会产生关于用户期望、需求甚至系统的心理模型的有意思的数据点集。我想知道通常有些设计师和研究人员对此反应过度是否因为他们认为如果承认潜在用户的一些想法有价值就相当降低了他们自身的价值。

One last thought I have is that the new crop of development-centric, massively networked products presents new challenges to the value of UCD. Startups have always moved quickly, and they’ve always run the risk of losing a race to release a product if they spend too much time “polishing” their product before an initial release. As a result, user experiences and feature depth were usually poor to start with and improved over time as the user base increased. The major changes in user experience were made while the number of users forced to adjust was still small, and by the time wide scale adoption was realized, changes generally settled into enhancements and logical upgrades (largely speaking software here, but Consumer Electronics also fits).

我最后想到的一点就是一批新的以发展为中心的、大规模网络化的产品对UCD的价值提出了新的挑战。如果在产品的最初版本发布之前，那些发展速度很快的新兴的网络公司需要花费大量的时间去“雕琢”他们的产品，他们通常会冒风险发布一款产品，风险就是输掉比赛。结果就是，用户体验和功能的深度在开始的时候通常是很糟糕的，但随着用户数的增加而一次次的进行改进。当一定量的用户被迫为了适应产品而进行调整自己的时候，用户体验的重大改变还是小部分的，当意识到那些小部分做出改变的用户体验被大规模采纳的时候，这些改变就变得理所当然并不断地进行升级（这里主要是说软件，但也同样适合消费类电子产品）。

However, recently, to be successful a product needs to become ubiquitous almost upon release. Between social networks and newly established cycles of technology obsolescence,* there is little time to build up a base of users to try the early versions of your product before widespread acceptance. One might assume this would motivate companies to work harder to use UCD to create good designs before that initial release, but this has not been the strategy applied by the biggest winners. Instead, I believe successful companies are setting out to provide one or a handful of killer features, often wrapped in a barely serviceable user experience, to as many people as quickly as possible. Rather than risk missing out on a key moment, they skip the needs gathering and early stage user research and take their best shot instead. If they are successful and widely adopted, the reasoning goes, they can go back and improve the experience later with direct user feedback.

然而，想要成为一个成功的产品，那么几乎在产品发布的同时就要变得无处不在。在社交网络和新确立的技术过时周期之间，几乎没有时间积累用户群去测试产品被广泛接受前的早期版本。有些人可能会认为这将促使公司在UCD方面做更多的努力从而在最初版本发布之前创造出更多优秀的设计，但是那些最成功的公司并不会使用这种策略。相反，我认为许多成功的公司都在采取以下策略：开发一个拥有几乎完美用户体验的产品，这些完美的用户体验就是这个产品的杀手锏，并尽快的发布给尽可能多的人。与其冒着错失关键时刻的风险，他们不如跳过需求采集和前期的用户研究阶段，取而代之的是尽全力去把某一点做到最好。如果他们成功了并且得到广泛的接受，就言之成理了，之后他们可以根据直接的用户反馈去改进用户体验。

Of course, this approach runs into a lot of practical issues. For instance, there is an installed user base who may rebel when confronted with change (although if you provide an irreplaceable device/service, people will complain but still be your customer). Additionally, once the company is successful, it has the dual role of providing an improved future experience and maintaining the current experience, splitting resources and attention. For this reason, companies often find it hard to actually follow through on step 2 of the plan where step one is “get customers” and step two is “make product better for customers.” In this phase, iterative refinements of the product design get bogged down in new features, and there is no time for conducting full-spectrum user research.

当然，这种方法也会出许多实际操作上的问题。例如，产品发布之后而面临着某些改变的时候，那些已经建立的用户群会有抗拒情绪（当然，如果你依然提供了一种不可替代的产品或服务，那么用户报怨之后依然是你的客户）。另外，一旦公司获得成功，就会出现提供改进后的用户体验和保持目前的用户体验，分割资源和分散注意力的双重作用。由于这个原因，公司很难在实际操作中完成“第一步抢客户、第二步做更好的产品给客户”的计划中的第二步。在这个阶段，产品设计的不断优化就淹没在各种新的功能中了，也没有时间来执行完整的用户研究了。

Based on these factors, I do wonder, outside of giant corporations or products with decade-spanning development (such as aircraft, medical technologies or anything the government watches over), are we likely to see a rapid decline in user research in innovative product designs, and in early product development for most products? My intuition is that we will see an increase in demand for practitioners capable of research, design and implementation, but with less specialized training in user research and user centered design. The only “concrete” evidence I can back it up with is my anecdotal observation that the majority of interesting opportunities for user research I’ve found have been specifically requesting a developer/engineer with the ability to conduct research or complete designs in addition to implementing them.

基于这些因素，我想知道，除了那些巨型企业或跨度长达十年的产品开发之外（比如飞机、医疗技术或那些政府负责），我们是否更倾向于在创新性产品设计和许多产品开发的早期阶段削弱用户研究？我的直觉是我们将会看到逐渐提高对从业者的研究、设计和实现三个方面能力的要求，但会减少对用户研究和以用户为中心的设计的方法的专门训练。能支持我直觉的唯一“具体的”依据就是我的兴趣使然的观察，那就是我所发现的大多数具有吸引力的用户研究的工作岗位都特别要求一个开发者/工程师具有落实研究或完善设计的能力，以此来弥补他们自身的不足。

* Products such as netbooks, iPads, iPods and smartphones are as expensive as appliances we used to expect 10+ years of service from. The average washing machine is less than an iPad, but you can expect the iPad to be out of date in ~ 2 years. People would be up in arms if their washing machines (or even microwaves, at 1/4 the price) stopped performing after 2 years.

诸如上网本、iPads、iPods和智能手机这些产品的价格已经如同家用电器一样昂贵了，我们过去通常希望家用电器能工作10年以上。洗衣机的平均价格要低于一台iPad，但你能接受iPad在2年后过时。如果一台洗衣机（或微波炉，只有1/4 iPad价格）在2年后坏了，你肯定会火冒三丈。

Travis Bowles, M.S., is a usability consultant in San Francisco specializing in enterprise software, novel consumer electronics, and web interfaces.

Travis Bowles,是一名工作于旧金山的专注于企业软件、创新性消费类电子产品和互联网界面的可用性顾问。