Human-centered vs. user-centered approaches to information system design

Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application, 2003 by Gasson, Susan

ABSTRACT

Despite continuing debates about the "user" emphasis in HCI, new design approaches, such as interaction design, continue to focus on humans as technology users, constraining the human-centeredness of design outcomes. This paper argues that the difference between "user" focus and a human-centered focus lies in the way in which technology is designed. The emphasis on problem closure that is embedded in current approaches to designing information systems (IS) precludes an examination of those issues central to human-centered design.

The paper reviews recent approaches to user-centered IS design and concludes that these methods are targeted at the closure of technology-centered problems, rather than the investigation of suitable changes to a system of human-activity supported by technology. A dual-cycle model of human-centered design is presented, that balances systemic inquiry methods with human-centered implementation methods. The paper concludes with a suggestion that IS design should be viewed as a dialectic between organizational problem inquiry and the implementation of business process change and technical solutions.

INTRODUCTION

By focusing on usability, the IS literature too often overlooks the social context of use. Bjorn-Andersen (1988) criticized the narrow definition of human-computer interaction (HCI) in the literature, with the words: "it is essential that we see our field of investigation in a broader context. A 'human' is much more than eye and finger movements". So how do we design for human-centeredness? Gill (1991) defines human-centeredness as "a new technological tradition which places human need, skill, creativity and potentiality at the center of the activities of technological systems." The human-centered approach to the design of technology arose as a reaction to perceptions that traditional approaches to technology design deskill technology users and impoverish the quality of working life (Gill, 1991; Scarbrough and Corbett, 1991). While many of the issues of human-centeredness have been adopted by the IS and HCI literature, many have been considered to lie outside the boundaries of "user" interactions with computers. This is because of a focus on technology and how humans interact with technology, rather than questioning how and why technology may be of service in supporting human work. Despite continuing debates about a focus on human actors as "users" of technology, this issue has not gone away and continues to constrain new, "user-centered" approaches to IS design, such as agile software development (Beck, 1999; Fowler and Highsmith, 2001; Highsmith, 2000) and interaction design (Cooper, 1999; Preece, Rogers and Sharp, 2002; Winograd, 1994). These constraints sit poorly with the need to design systems that support emerging knowledge processes (Markus, Majchrzak and Gasser, 2002) and result in systems that do not support the processes required to support organizational work (Butler and Fitzgerald, 2001; Lehaney, Clarke, Kimberlee and Spencer-Matthews, 1999).

This paper is structured as follows. The next section provides a discussion of the tenets of human-centered design and why this is not catered for in the mutual adaptation that is theorized to take place between organization and technology. Then we examine what we know about the nature of IS design processes, that makes human-centeredness problematic. Following this, the paper critiques some recent developments in IS design, from the perspective of human-centeredness:

* Participatory design is discussed as an alternative to the traditional, technology-centered system development life-cycle that resulted from an emphasis on human-computer interaction (HCI).

* Interaction design, a development of HCI that considers work processes is examined.

* Use-cases as part of a Unified Modeling Language (UML) approach are discussed, as a recent advancement for modeling business processes and user-interactions with the intended information system.

* Agile Software Development is presented, as uniquely a practitioner-initiated approach to human-centeredness in IS design.

The paper argues that each of these approaches focuses on user-centeredness at the expense of human-centeredness, because of an implicit IS focus on technical problem-closure, rather than inquiry. An alternative, "dual cycle" model of IS design is presented, that focuses on problem definition jointly with problem closure, based on a longitudinal study of stakeholder design.

HUMAN-CENTERED INFORMATION SYSTEM DESIGN

Recent theories that explain the relationship between technology and organization have argued that the two are mutually interdependent: each shapes the other through self-reinforcing cycles of sensemaking and giving form to the organizational meanings that ensue (Majchrzak, Rice, Malhotra, King and Ba, 2000; Orlikowski, 1992; e.g. Orlikowski, 2000; Scarbrough and Corbett, 1991). But the process by which meanings are explored and then translated into organizational procedures, with their supporting technical artifacts - the process of design - has received relatively little attention. Information technology (IT) is most often viewed as a "black box", the form of which is predetermined by decisions as to its role and purpose (Orlikowski and Iacono, 2001). But the physical ways in which users may interact with an IT system, the work-processes that are supported or not supported, and the extent to which users are permitted to control IT system processes fundamentally affect how work is performed, regardless of the adaptation processes that follow. For example, in a study of computer-supported factory automation, Wilkinson (1983) reports that a company which wanted to purchase a system that permitted their shop-floor workers to control the manufacturing process found that there were none available on the market. The designers of such systems assumed a managerial intention to remove autonomy from manufacturing workers and so designed systems to prevent workers from "tampering" with production control parameters. Similarly, Button et al. (Button, Mason and Sharrock, 2003), writing twenty years later, discuss how a workflow and information management system prevented workers from managing their work in the most effective way, because of assumptions built into the system about the flow of work. The need to understand a "web" of computer-supported activity, when designing an information system (Kling and Scacchi, 1982) and to understand how organizational purposes are transformed through the IS design and implementation process (Markus and Bjorn-Andersen, 1987; Markus and Robey, 1988) appear to be well established principles in the IS literature. Yet these principles appear to have had relatively little impact on IS research or practice (Orlikowski and Iacono, 2001). These issues have largely disappeared from the IS literature. As a result, there are few papers that do not uncritically adopt the HCI perspective that human-centeredness = usability. Much of the work that deals with human-centeredness is dated, or is located in the organizational management literature; this is reflected in the discussion here.