Blatant provocation

I will start this post with a blatantly provocative statement:

Uncritical application of a user centered design approach to a branding problem can harm an organization’s brand more than it helps it.

1. UCD tends to lead organizations away from sustainable differentiation toward commodity strategies that market leaders are  well equipped to defeat in the long-term.
2. The kinds of improvements UCD discovers tend to be atomistic and easily imitated, and are therefore provide only unsustainable competitive advantage.
3. Because the typical UCD understanding of brand is inadequate, attempts by UCD to create “branded experiences” tend to actually cooperate with and reinforce the market leader’s positioning. The vision of an ideal offering implicit in users’ perceptions and decision criteria are often learned from the market leader who is far better equipped to deliver on those criteria than contenders. To “discover” these criteria and present them as objective truth, and to attempt to position an organization in accordance with them is to fall into playing a rigged game.

The fundamental insight of synetic branding is that at its essence brand is a vision — a way of seeing — so compelling that reality is organized and seen by this vision. The goal of synetic branding is to discover a way of seeing that reveals the organization’s own offering as superior. This name for this way of seeing is synesis, a social form of understanding which binds an organization together with all its internal and external stakeholders.

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Now for the verbose version:

User Centered Design (UCD) is the right approach to take toward a design problem when two conditions are true:

1. The design problem can be approached as being already adequately understood — that is, the outline of the solution to the problem is given and only the details are in question.
2. The understanding of the design problem results in a design solution that serves the aims of the sponsoring organization in the near- and long-term.

If these two conditions are met, and this is not the usual case, UCD is sufficient.

The weakness of UCD is it fails to ask whether these conditions are met. Instead, because it lacks the awareness and the tools it needs to ascertain its own suitability, it bypasses this question and gets right to work on answers. Accordingly:

1. UCD unconsciously assumes whatever first rough sense of the problem it finds, however rough and unclear the conception is, is an adequate understanding and starts elaborating its answer, which is usually conceived as discovering and addressing as-yet undiscovered needs (adding new useful features) and filling in gaps in the offering and refining the usability and charm of the whole by fully adapting it to the preconceptions of the user (making features more useful and desirable to the user). UCD tends toward atomistic solutions.
2. UCD assumes that doing a better job of what everyone else is attempting to do will give the sponsoring organization a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, UCD habitually ignores the crucial question of sustainability: how long can this competitive advantage be held? How easily can a competitor imitate and incorporate UCD’s discoveries into its own offerings? Atomistic solutions are easily stolen and incorporated. It’s a matter of adding on this and polishing that.

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Generally the best candidate for UCD are market leaders whose vision of its offering is the predominant one, which everyone else unconsciously accepts and works within at a disadvantage.

A market leader emerges where one organization has persuaded the market to see as ideal the offering it is most suited to offer. The followers, because they are unable to see an alternative and lack awareness of the possibility that an alternative could exist, chase this same ideal.

And when UCD goes out and researches how users see, what they find is often only this ideal. They unearth only what the market leader itself has buried in the users’ minds. When UCD designs according to this understanding, all it does is reinforce the perception that this understanding is truly the “objective standard” of the industry.

Automatic application of UCD reduces a client to becoming amplifiers of the market leader’s brand and a cheap R&D department that toils to find new ways to invent and polish easily imitated offerings the market leader better equipped to deliver.