Sufficient and necessary conditions for routine deployment of user-centred design

The greatest challenge facing the HCI community is not the solution of any particular problem in the domain of human-computer interaction. Rather, it is the introduction of HCI practice into routine design of software products. Approaches to fostering the uptake of HCI solutions and, particularly, user-centred approaches to the design of software products have included education of designers and product managers, integration of user-centred design processes into software development processes and placement of HCI practitioners into development organisations. In practice, none of these approaches has proven successful. Software systems continue to be designed with little regard to their usage requirements and, consequently fail to meet their users' expectations. This paper exposes some of the problems associated with HCI-centric approaches to the deployment of user-centred design. It contrasts these with the approaches to deployment applied when the product of user-centred design, that is, ease of use of software products, is adopted as a business objective. These include not only the demand for a user-centred approach to design, but also the creation of organisations specifically structured to facilitate the uptake of user-centred design processes by product owners.