When computing behemoth Dell re-launched its retail site this week, Tom West, one of the Texas-based operation’s e-business directors, commented: “We wanted to make it easier for our customers to do business with us”[i]. Improving the design of the customer, or user, interface is now high on the list of business priorities. User-centred design – once an obscure philosophy pursued at the West Coast research labs such as the Stanford Research Institute[ii] and Xerox PARC[iii] – is now widely accepted in commerce, government, and beyond.

The introduction of rationality and empathy into design practice can only be a good thing. In its day user-centred design was a radical and empowering concept, but its acceptance masks other less inspiring developments.

In the decades since its conception much has changed in the world of the ‘user’. However, rather than adapting to more varied subjects and activities, user-centred design has to a large extent lost its ambition and been supplanted by one of its elements: the relatively conservative concept of usability. This change has been reflected in business with the rise of customer-driven development and customer-relationship management.

Computers are no longer used just used for Taylorist, task-based work, and they are no longer confined to desks and offices. Computing is becoming pervasive and computer-based devices are used by almost everyone in the West.

Users – or as Professor James Woudhuysen[iv] championed them a decade ago “the people, formerly known as ‘users’” – are really doers or actors. They are multi-dimensional and smart, willing to learn difficult tools when they need to, and adapt things to their own requirements as they see fit.

In the early period of Web design there was a lot of experimentation. Technology and self-expression tended to drive design, and much of the learning about user-centred design that had come to inform software development was lost. Nervous clients, anxious not to miss the next big thing but unwilling to invest in real innovation, often colluded in these indulgent trends.

At that time it was important to establish that people (and clients) should be served by design, and that usability was an essential component of design practice. To this end Jakob Nielsen and I co-programmed the Design For Usability conference in 2000[v]. Since then usability has become a dominant mantra – applied as a static set of rules – and has lost its enlightening power. Moreover the sense of human agency implied in the term ‘user’ has been forgotten. Reflecting current political trends, usability gurus are quick with criticism but can’t formulate realistic or imaginative solutions. They are puritanical in their aesthetic sensibilities. And they are all too ready to attack corporations for their selfish ways, and eager to treat users as barely capable victims.

Usability is a valuable element of the design process, but it can’t substitute for or dominate it, as it is severely limited. Usability testing can’t anticipate all scenarios of use of a product, and it can’t evaluate the design of features that people don’t (yet) understand. Usability can be used to incrementally improve an innovation, but it can’t drive innovation. Customer focus can inform, and usability can test, the appropriateness of some design solutions, but they can only make incremental improvements. As Bose Corporation designer Robert Reimann puts it, “you can’t sand a table into a chair”[vi].

Usability – and the cautious thinking it embodies – has come to dominate thinking about the design process. As Robert Brunner, a partner at in the San Francisco office of the celebrated design firm Pentagram, will argue at the HITS conference in Chicago this week: “it really doesn’t matter if something is usable. What matters is that it is in fact, useful. And even better if it is desirable”[vii]. This possibility of making someone’s experience of a product both successful and satisfying is more likely to be achieved in more mature areas of design, such as newspapers, where complex patterns of communication have been established with which elements that produce an overall ‘quality of experience’ can be incorporated. If usability becomes the focus too early in the development of a product it is likely that a more ingenious and ambitious way of solving the problem will be missed, and a less useful and desirable solution will be polished to perfection.

To break the current deadlock in user-interface and product design we need radical innovations. We could start by going beyond the text- and list-based interface of the overly lauded Google and its siblings. Although Google.com product manager Marissa Mayer cogently defends its user interface and should at least be debating what could be learned from its northern Californian neighbour Grokker’s information visualisation-driven product.

The mantra of simplicity can mask a belief that people are stupid, and only capable of dealing with a certain amount of complexity. It can also lead to products that in the interests of supporting everyone satisfy no one. We would do well to remember Einstein’s quip that we should “make everything as simple as possible but no simpler”.

Too much user focus may be a barrier to innovation. Research with users is likely to tell us that they desire an improvement on something they already know and understand – faster calculators rather than spreadsheets. Ask them if they would use a proposed innovation and they will say No – and then adopt it when they have seen its utility demonstrated in the real world.

Even if design could be purely driven by what people say they want the designer would still have to apply their skill in prioritising these desires and giving them form. Recognising this, designers should rise above the interests and perspectives of particular users and push their own intuition, and instinct for innovation. Design is a skill and not amenable to plebiscites. They might note the sentiment of BBC titan Lord Reith, who when asked whether he was going to give the people what they wanted, replied: “No. Something better than that”[viii].

We should also be wary of concerns about novelty and complexity. People are perfectly able to learn new and complex tools if they see the need, and this has been demonstrated countless times: from the VisiCalc spreadsheet (which required learning to use the Apple II as well) to Windows, and email to SMS. They are also adept at finishing the design process by adapting things for their own specific uses.

What people are not is forecasters or designers. We do not to demean our fellow citizens when we observe that if asked what they want they will tend to tell us that they desire an improvement on something they already know and understand, or that they are likely to say that they would have no use for a proposed innovation that they later adopt. We are simply acknowledging that forecasters are good at envisioning futures, designers at problems solving between multiple stakeholders and people’s needs and desires, and people are good at... whatever they are good at.

Many of the supposed usability problems people experience result from design solutions being constrained to the PC Web browser model. The desktop PC and Web sites are not always the right platforms for design solutions. They are largely dumb and – not being able to infer much from a user’s context, location or activity – force them to explicitly give this information, introducing hassle and margin for error, and reducing usability.

We are no longer restricted to Doug Engelbart’s model of the knowledge worker. Enabled by networks people are using computer power everywhere for everything. As Goldsmiths research student Alex Wilkie puts it: “The task-oriented user has escaped and is now walking in the wild”.

The design challenges of networked and digital products are greater – and more exciting – than ever. As well as ordering bespoke PCs online people are text messaging when they walk, reading news at bus stops, and using electronic maps for wayfinding. Designers – in collaboration with clients prepared to make the necessary investment – need to innovate to deliver people imaginative products. As well as empathising with people, they should recognise their intelligence and pragmatism, and understand that they will take time to learn things that will deliver them real benefits. With this approach, future online retailing stories may amount to more than a Web site re-jig.