Design through Immersion

Niels Diffrient makes several profound points during his TED talk, touching on concepts like accommodating edge cases vs the majority, the fact that end users rarely ever take the time to adjust or configure a product, and how good design can also be asthetically pleasing and interesting. But what really resonated with me was how he immersed himself in the fields applicable to what he was designing.

If you wanted it to fly, you had to learn the discipline of flying.

As a business analyst, I came to a similar realization somewhat early in my career. Not only were end-users poorly equipped to translate their needs to an engineer or developer who would do the work, but often times they would make things up or answer my questions without actually knowing the answers. This would result in a spec going to the development department with what we believed to have all of the bases covered only to find out down the road that it did not because we got incorrect information. Now over the course of my career I got better at spotting these types of situations and learned how to politically maneuver around them, but ultimately I was just the middle man and didn't have any first hand knowledge to build on; I had to rely on the information being given to me by the end-users and it became a game of picking out the correct information.

This all changed when I proved myself as an analyst and was given more agency over my process. When I was tasked with a major project the first thing I would do is shadow someone from the department, often picking up some files to do the work myself for a few days or weeks. This immersion in the process gave me more insight into the project than I could have ever obtained from meetings and phone calls. There are details that are overlooked and opportunities that would have never been realized had someone with my intentions and skill set not taken the time to really get into the work and see first hand what was needed for improvement.

You cannot design a chair on paper without understanding ergonomics and how the body works and expect the chair to work very well. The same holds true for most all designs: you need to truly understand the product or need and the underlying disciplines to create a really good one.