"User-centered design means understanding what your users need, how they think, and how they behave - and incorporating that understanding into every aspect of your process"
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User-centered design, in Garrett's framing, is less a feel-good slogan than an operational demand: stop treating "the user" as a cardboard cutout you invoke at the end, and start treating them as the raw material of every decision. The phrasing is doing a lot of work. "Need, think, behave" triangulates three different truths about people that teams love to separate into silos: requirements (what they say they need), cognition (how they make sense of information), and real-world action (what they actually do when no one's watching). Garrett is insisting that if you only capture one of these, you will build the wrong thing confidently.
The subtext is a critique of product culture that worships cleverness. Many organizations claim to be user-focused while really being stakeholder-centered, roadmap-centered, or engineering-centered. By defining user-centered design as "incorporating that understanding into every aspect of your process", he points at the real failure mode: research treated as a phase, not a habit. It's a warning against the performative usability test at the end that rubber-stamps decisions already made.
Context matters: Garrett helped popularize UX as a discipline at a time when "design" often meant surface polish. This quote stakes UX's territory as strategic, not decorative. It also smuggles in a business argument. Understanding users isn't charity; it's risk management. The promise is pragmatic: fewer expensive misfires, fewer features nobody asked for, and products that earn their adoption the hard way - by fitting into how people actually live and work.
The subtext is a critique of product culture that worships cleverness. Many organizations claim to be user-focused while really being stakeholder-centered, roadmap-centered, or engineering-centered. By defining user-centered design as "incorporating that understanding into every aspect of your process", he points at the real failure mode: research treated as a phase, not a habit. It's a warning against the performative usability test at the end that rubber-stamps decisions already made.
Context matters: Garrett helped popularize UX as a discipline at a time when "design" often meant surface polish. This quote stakes UX's territory as strategic, not decorative. It also smuggles in a business argument. Understanding users isn't charity; it's risk management. The promise is pragmatic: fewer expensive misfires, fewer features nobody asked for, and products that earn their adoption the hard way - by fitting into how people actually live and work.
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| Topic | Technology |
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