Design Issues: Volume 26, Number 3 Summer 2010 40 The Sword of Data: Does Human-Centered Design Fulfill Its Rhetorical Responsibility? Erin Friess For more than two decades, user-centered design (UCD) has been the guiding philosophy and process in the field of design from both practice and pedagogy perspectives. Although there is no singular agreement on just what constitutes UCD and many different names for and “flavors” of UCD have emerged—human-centered design, participatory design, activity-centered design, and contextual design, just to name a few—nearly every version relies on an early and continual interaction with people who will actually use the product. 1 Designers then use findings from the interactions (e.g., surveys, focus groups, card sorting exercises, document reviews, scenario-based testing, and plus-minus testing) to guide the design solutions. User-centered design—or the more popular human-centered design (HCD)—has served the discipline of design well, giving design a purpose, a structure, and, perhaps most importantly, a story to tell. However, HCD, as it is often practiced today, is no longer just human centered but empirically centered. Rather than being guided by interactions with end users, designers are being forced into the role of engineer, making decisions based solely on quantifiable and easily relatable data gathered from the end users. To illustrate, in early 2009, Google’s lead visual designer, Douglas Bowman, left the company because of the company’s perhaps over-reliance on empirical data. 2 According to the New York Times, when a Google team couldn’t decide between two shades of blue, a test was ordered on 41 intermediate shades to determine which one “performs better.” 3 Bowman himself was asked to empirically defend whether a border should be 3, 4, or 5 pixels wide. 4 Ultimately for Bowman, data became “a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring decisions,” 5 and his disdain for a “design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data” eventually caused him to leave Google. 6 Such a reliance on empirical data is, in many ways, human- centered design at its most extreme. While there is nothing inherently “wrong” in such an approach to design, focusing solely on user input to drive output betrays design’s rhetorical roots. In what follows, I explore the history and practice of HCD, consider the rhetorical issues that arise with the practice of extreme empirical HCD, and suggest that a move away from empirically driven design and © 2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1 J. Karat, M. E. Atwood, S. M. Dray, M. Rantzar, & D. R. Wixon (1996). User- Centered Design: Quality or Quackery? Paper presented at the CHI 96. J. Karat, “Evolving the Scope of User-Centered Design.” Communications of the ACM, 40:7 (1997): 33–38. 2 Douglas Bowman, “Goodbye, Google.” Stopdesign blog. http://stopdesign.com. Posted March 20, 2009 (accessed July 7, 2009). 3 Laura M. Holson, “Putting a Bolder Face on Google.” The New York Times (March 1, 2009): BU1. 4 Bowman, “Goodnight Google.” 5 Interestingly, number 5 on Google’s list of “commands” for User Experience is “Dare to innovate.” 6 Bowman, “Goodnight Google.”