QN #1: UI Design and Lead Users

One of the more interesting classes for me this semester is "Developing Breakthrough Products and Services" with a guy named Eric von Hippel. He focuses heavily on user innovation in product development, with a particular eye towards hacker and open source communities that I find both refreshing, and fascinating in an informed academic setting. Asside from the fact that this course is the anit-mater to my "Managing Innovation" course (wherin all development is the result of carefully structured corporate investment) I have also encountered a few sticking issues that bother me. One of them is that lead users are not the holy grail of product development either; there is at least one thing that they do continuously badly: UI Design.

Lead users are bad at interface design, because they develop interfaces that make sense to them, te informed lead user who is trying to do something that no one has ever tried to do before. They already understand enough of the context that the few additional pices of information that are relevant to them and their interactions are obvious and trivial. This also makes it very difficult to convince them that anything needs to be changed, as it is already "easy to use" even if noone else can use it (after all, it makes sense to them).

Lead users, it is said, are each working to scratch an individual itch. At least, this is often true in hacker communities, or it is often cited as a potential motivation for them to engage in their engaged activites. Again, however, once the itch is scratched there is very little incentive to re-invent the wheel in terms of improving the interface.

Further, lead user groups are typically dominated and controlled by respected influentail contributors, the "olde timers" of this sort of a world. These individuals hold some power in terms of making community oriented decisions (which design ends up being) and can steer the progress of UI development in the direction of standards which fit with their perspective on what users should be able to efficiently interact with.

If we imagine a typical normal curve, the lead users are isolated in the left tail. The most extreme case, the single user case who develops a particular feature, the UI is essentially only useful for them. Community pressures eventually push the design to the point where it meets the needs of a majority of influential lead users. However, the issue still remains that lead users are strange, and what they agree on as a group is often significantly differnet from what "normal" users would find easy to interace with. Thus, I propose that there is a gap between the majority of influential lead users, and the "normal" people located in the majority section of the curve. I like to think of this as the "linux is hard to use gap" because, after all, on the surface it is true: linux is hard to use when you're coming from a Windows or Mac environment.

This problem can be addressed by developing traditional marketing exploration procedures to existing lead user products in order to bridge the usability gap.