(highlight:: User-Centered Thinking in Product Design Ignores the Effect a Product has on the Other Actors in the System
Key takeaways:
• Narrowing our thinking about users of products can have drawbacks.
• It's important to consider how people who are not users of our products are affected.
• Thinking only about individuals might leave out differing behaviors or impacts on people as groups or segments or populations.
• It's important to consider populations that are marginalized when engaging in product design.
• Edtech developed in the education space is often agnostic to who are under-resourced students and who aren't.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
In the realm of design in which I've engaged for most of my career, which is technology industry focused, that gets the design thinking process gets implemented as a user centered process. So thinking pretty much primarily, if not exclusively about the user and playing the role of user advocacy as a design practitioner. And I think there are some problems with this. One is that the way we tend to approach it or tend to try to understand the user experience is by, I guess, articulating things like pain points or an understanding of context in the context Of a person's direct benefit of use of the products that we're designing or services that we're designing. So how does a person experience this tool or product or service in the moment and as an individual? And I think there's some drawbacks to that. One is that it narrows how we think about users of products. That means we're not thinking about how people are affected, who might not even be users of our products. And it might narrow our thinking about users themselves. So really thinking about individuals might leave out, I guess, differing behaviors or impacts on people as groups or segments or populations. So I think a lot about, for example, populations that are kind of marginalized when we're engaging in product design.)
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