Former innovation exec, Juhani Risku
I was left with mixed feelings after reading the latest article related to the latest book about Nokia’s crisis, New Nokia – the manuscript. The Register has made an interview of the author that you can read here.
One of the critiques of the author is to the Contextual Design approach:
Another feature of the modern Nokia bureaucracy, that wasn’t present 15 years ago, is the obsession with data gathering. I remarked that no other company spends us much on ethnography or focus groups, or market segmentation strategies. Turn to almost any page on the website, and you’re invited to fill in an questionnaire.
“When you have a branded product, the marketing is merely information”“There is a philosophy called Contextual Design, every designer at Nokia has been trained in it by the guru Karen Holtzblatt. Everybody has attended her courses and got her very expensive book signed. The idea is that you ask the users what they are doing, then design something. If you think about Apple, they don’t ask anybody. The idea of users as designers is a catastrophe!
While I agree with the rest of the article, this particular part is wrong; Contextual design is NOT about asking the users what the want, or having users as designer. It is about understanding and modelling the context of use and the activities user take part to.
However, I feel this to be partially true of another user-centred design approach, Usability Engineering, that is heavily skewed towards usability metrics, goals and formative/summative evaluations. In truth, both approaches can result in a lenghty design process that doesn’t qualify for all mobile development projects – it is more suited to R&D concept development really.
I am aware that Usability Engineering had quite a role at Nokia and this could possibly result in slow-paced, incremental innovation rather than evolutionary change.
I would be curious now to read more from some UX guy at Nokia if that is the case.
Further reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability_engineering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_design
The interview of the author at the Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/22/nokia_manifesto_risku/page3.html
Another interesting article from Tomi T Ahonen
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/07/obituary-for-opk-wall-street-is-a-cruel-mistress-nokia-searching-for-ceo.html
