The way we work as human-centred practitioners needs to change. From its beginnings as an engineering technique, through its transition to being a product design tool, user experience now needs to be adopted as a strategic approach.
Being human-centred is ultimately about making the right decisions. To make the right decisions, you need the right evidence. And to get the right evidence, you need to ask the right questions. This is where human-centred practitioners are well placed to step in.
Understanding the past, present and future
We can understand this shift in the role of human-centred approaches through the lens of the three horizons framework. This is an approach to understanding and responding to major changes in society. It shows how a transformational future builds on the innovative present to embed the lessons from the past.
Horizon 1 represents the way things have been done before. Lessons are learned, and valuable aspects of these approaches are preserved.
But eventually innovation is required, and Horizon 2 emerges. We can think of Horizon 2 as the way things are done now.
The innovative practices that are developed in this stage cause tensions that will in turn create the need for a more transformational approach. This is Horizon 3, or the way things will be done in the future.
The evolution of human-centred approaches over the past few decades can be seen in this light. It shows us how our practice is evolving to answer increasingly fundamental questions, improving both business outcomes and users’ experiences.
A history of human-centred approaches, through the lens of three horizons
Horizon 1: Usability engineering
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as technology started to become an everyday part of our lives, ensuring that humans could use that technology became increasingly important. This led to the development and formalisation of the discipline that, at the time, we called usability engineering.
The origin of usability goes back far further than the 1980s. Jeff Sauro has a brief history of usability that goes all the way back to scientific management in 1911. In the 1980s, the formalisation of usability engineering was a horizon 3 movement. But work to understand how people’s needs can best be met by products, services and systems has been carried out for many centuries.
Valuable aspects of these practices carry forward to the way we do things today. There still is, and always will be, a crying need for this type of usability engineering. But eventually, new approaches develop alongside existing practices.
Horizon 2: User-centred product design
At the turn of the century, attention turned more towards improving users’ overall experiences within individual products and services. User experience emerged as the discipline that helps achieve those improved experiences. Design came into play. Much of what was useful from Horizon 1 was carried across into this product-centric world.
This has been an innovative space. But that innovation has occasionally brought tensions. The world of product management has developed its own cultures and processes around understanding users.
Meanwhile, businesses have increasingly turned towards fast-paced agile processes that, if implemented poorly, value outputs over outcomes. As a result, meaningful user insights can struggle to get a foothold.
At the same time, the lens of design can be limiting to user experience. Research practice has increasingly been co-opted by non-researchers, alongside the rise of design thinking. This can cause user experience to be constrained to output-centric, product-specific questions, rather than people’s fundamental needs.
Yet, many of people’s greatest needs go deeper than the interface, and cut across multiple products. To meet people’s core needs, we must go beyond feeding the feature factory and tweaking visuals. Human-centred approaches are therefore moving towards horizon 3.
Horizon 3: Strategic human-centred decision-making
When everything is framed through the lens of product design, organisations risk failing to fulfil people’s deepest needs. This might be because the product’s vision and roadmap are often set in stone even before a product team is put in place. In this case, the team only exists because someone wants to make their idea a reality.
Moreover, organisations often have multiple product teams working in silos. These teams often struggle to make their individual solutions joined-up and cohesive.
Human-centred approaches instead need to make impact at the level of organisational strategy. It must ensure that business decisions are informed by a deep understanding of human-centred insights, before those decisions are executed by product teams and turned into feature backlogs.
Savvy organisations have always understood this. Competitive advantage is all about understanding something that your competitors do not. This means asking questions that your competitors haven’t even thought about yet.
Ask better questions to gain a competitive advantage
Strategy adviser Roger Martin describes how competitive advantage rests on asking the right questions. He asks us to imagine a long row of rooms separated by thick curtains.
I prefer the analogy of a fish swimming upstream.
The more you understand about your environment, the further upstream you can get. Your position in the stream is determined by what questions your organisation is asking.
Those questions are what your organisation uses to understand the market. This means understanding your competitors and, crucially, your customers and users. Your organisation chooses what initiatives to pursue based on the knowledge you attain through the questions you are asking.
If you do a good enough job at asking the right questions, answering those questions and meeting your users’ needs, you find yourself swimming upstream. As you leap over the waterfall with an innovation, you enter a new environment where you are asking new questions based on your new understanding.
These new questions are ones you would never have thought of before. Your competitors further downstream aren’t even asking these questions yet. They can’t see what you can see in your upstream position. This is one way you can get a competitive advantage.
Still, if you become complacent, you can find your organisation losing its edge. Then you drift back downstream where you are no longer asking innovative questions. You need to keep asking better questions to stay upstream.
Deploying human-centred insights to swim upstream
The future of organisational strategy has been under our noses all along. The skillset of human-centred practitioners is ideal for enabling organisations to gain those insights that catapult them towards innovation, helping them swim upstream and embed their competitive advantage.
Researchers who have been asking questions with a product focus are now being deployed ask to more fundamental questions of organisational strategy.
The third horizon of research will be a win-win situation. Organisations will ask better questions, gain clearer insights, and make better decisions. And users’ experiences will improve as a result of the research revolution.
Further reading
- Genevieve Conley Gambill — Research isn’t dying, it’s evolving
- Dave Hora — The waves of research practice
- Jared Spool — Strategic UX research is the next big thing
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