But the transformation they couldn’t see was already taking shape. After Donald Norman’s book, The Design of Everyday Things, something shifted. He’d made some of the same connections between technology, social science, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology that Weiser, JSB, and others had, but Norman did so in a way that was accessible
Redesigning and rebuilding enterprise software, and then getting organizations to migrate, means corralling and aligning a lot of different people — and seeing beyond short-term obstacles. Partly as a result of this difficulty, there aren’t many inspiring examples out there to draw designers in. Why work on enterprise apps when you can work on a beautiful consumer product?
We need to embrace this different context and determine what is approachable, rewarding, and easy to use. As designers, we need to focus more on efficiency and effectiveness than on engagement or common models of intuition. We’ll need to rethink notions of co-creation. Perhaps the whole notion of how we think about user-centered design will need to evolve…
