Ideologies and Design

I can thank the History Channel for about 90% of my knowledge in World History. I make this disclaimer with the only intention of letting the reader know that I am by no means a History expert. With this cleared out, I want to dedicate this posting to the subject of Sociology. I will dedicate the next posting to Developmentalism, an ideology that flourished in the 20th century.

The subject of Sociology came up during a work discussion about the skepticism we encounter with some clients in the business world who are not familiar with the approach to research that user-centered designers take. When comparing the user-centered research methods against market research, we face such questions as "Is your research statistically valid?" or "Do you expect me to make a product decision based on your interviews with a few people?"

I guess we can thank Sociology for paving the way to this type of thinking in the Western World. To get myself acquainted with the subject, I bought a short book called "Introducing Sociology" by Richard Osborne and Borin Van Loon. The book is part of the "Introducing... " series, which takes a graphic approach to explaining some complicated subjects, such as Philosophy and Cultural studies. This series is definitely a good reference for people who, like me, are trying to get their toes wet without jumping into the pool.

Anyway, the term Sociology was coined by August Comte. He wrote a book in 1822 named "Plan of the Scientific Works Necessary for the Re-organization of Society." This was the first step to explaining human social behavior as a science. However, almost 200 years after the publication of Comte's works, Sociology has been unable to produce anything that scientifically resembles a natural law, and opposers claim that it is impossible to 'observe, verify and deduce general laws about human interaction.' According to the book I am reading, Sociology has been reduced to six types of generalizations, one of which is the claim to express generalities about human behavior. Again, these generalizations do not add up to any acceptable scientific, valid universal law.

So, going back to the types of questions that business people and market researchers ask user-centered designers, my answers would be: No, the user-centered approach is not statistically valid, and neither does it intend - or claim - to be, but that does not disproof its value... And, yes, insights from customers and users of products and services will give a client enough confidence to come up with a great idea on how to improve their experience. These insights bear much more value than statistics, tables and pie charts because they come from human beings, and not from somebody's very abstract interpretation of data that other people collected via surveys or focus groups.

If you are a user-centered designer or a market researcher, I kindly invite you to leave your comments.