The user as relational entity

Information Technology & People The user as relational entity: Options that deeper insight into user representations opens for human-centered design Sampsa Hyysalo Mikael Johnson

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Options that deeper insight into user representations opens for human-centered design

Received 10 January 2014 Revised 19 March 2014 Accepted 22 April 2014

Sampsa Hyysalo Department of Design, School of Arts, Design and Architecture & School of Business, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland, and

Mikael Johnson Downloaded by AALTO UNIVERSITY At 05:19 27 April 2015 (PT)

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland Abstract Purpose – “User” is the lingua franca term used across IT design, often critiqued for giving a reductionist portrayal of the human relationship with technologies. The purpose of this paper is to argue that equating “user” with flesh and blood “people out there” is naïve. Not only that, it closes important options in conducting human-centered design. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conceptually elaborate a relational understanding of the user and integrate research findings on user representations found at the intersection of humancentered design and social studies of technology. Findings – The user is best understood as a relational term that bridges between people out there and renditions of them relevant for design. A distinction between “user representations” and “engaged use” is a key distinction to clarify this further. Research to date demonstrates that R&D organizations have a wide range of user representations and positioning human-centered design to these would advance its likely yield. Research limitations/implications – The strategic positioning of user studies and other humancentered design within R&D organizations is a growing research area that merits further research. Practical implications – Descriptions of users would benefit from being more strategic in order to become viable amidst other design concerns. This can be aided by, for instance, visualizing the “users” that different fractions in the company rely on and compare these to the users indicated by humancentered design. Originality/value – The paper makes an original reconceptualization of the user and integrates literature on user representations to open new options for conducting human-centered design. Keywords Constructivism, Design research, End user, Socio-technical theory, Human-computer interaction (HCI) Paper type Conceptual paper

1. Introduction The user has for long been a lingua franca term used by engineers and designers to refer to people engaged with their products. Perhaps due to this legacy, advocates of more human-centered design also routinely deploy it. In this latter context deep ambiguity towards the term prevails. Much has been written (present authors included) Information Technology & People Vol. 28 No. 1, 2015 pp. 72-89 © Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0959-3845 DOI 10.1108/ITP-01-2014-0011

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their extremely insightful reviews. The authors acknowledge funding from Academy of Finland (User Innovation Pathways to Utility, Research Project No. 13138187) and the Emil Aaltonen Foundation (User Innovation Communities Research Project).

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about “the user,” giving a reductionist portrayal of the human relationship with technologies. Alternative terms could be used instead[1]. Yet, none of the alternatives has supplanted “the user” even in the human-centered quarters of designing. Perhaps a more nuanced response to “the user” then is to examine what the term does, what it highlights and what it conceals. The current paper joins this line of theorizing and seeks to enrich our understanding of the user within design and development practices. Equating user with “people out there” was perhaps needed in the 1980s and 1990s for user-centered design (UCD) to snap designers and design organizations out of relying on just their own images of the user and moving them to examining the real consequences designs would have to implied people. Below we explain how “the user” is, however, a more complex entity than just people out there. It is a relational term that links some aspects of these people to design. A given development organization will usually have considerable sets of understandings of users – some more adequate than others, some more visible than others and some more powerful than others and some more shared than others — and it is unavoidable that any new understandings of users will be positioned amidst these. Examining then the user within design practice makes visible that such scrutiny is not only theoretically relevant, but also helps make visible key actions in human-centered design practice, which have hitherto gone poorly explicated: The success of more human-centered design depends squarely on how design organizations appropriate its findings and concepts, in other words, the uptake of knowledge of “the-users-out-there” in relation to “the-users-already-in-there.” To explore this topic deeper we turn to works in the intersection of human-centered design research and social studies of technology. Ethnographies of design work suggest that users become “scenic” or “contextual” features of the design space (Sharrock and Anderson, 1994; Martin et al., 2007), which become evoked insofar as they constrain, define or enable considerations over the objects or systems developed. Users are not “the topic” of design, which is rather the object, service, or system. While one could argue that such a view of users is exactly the demarcation point to humancentered design, the issue is not so simple. Redström argues that the move towards interaction design and user experience design has run a risk of a subscribing to a misplaced idea of “user design” and “fit,” in that the whole of user action and interpretation should become designed (Redström, 2006, 2008): But there is a fundamental difference between designing things to be used and trying to design use or the user experience. To say that designers should refrain from over-determining use and users is not to say that ideas about use should not be part of our concern or even that it should not be our main concern, but that we need to acknowledge what it is we are designing and what falls outside of that. This is why the shift from object to user as a basis for design is so problematic: it blurs basic conceptual distinctions between the design, the interpretation, the experience, the use and the appropriation of an object (Redström, 2006, p. 135).

He further suggests that we move from static designer-user categorization to examine the activities that give shape to technology. UCD is in fact “use-before-use,” anticipating the usages before the rich and myriad engagements with technology have taken place. When the engagements do take place, there is shaping of design-in-use and often, also, explicit “design-after-design” by users as well as by designers (Botero and Hyysalo, 2013; Redström, 2008; Szymanski and Whalen, 2011). So designing objects, systems, services, and artifacts are one thing, their appropriation, adaptation, and experiencing are another. To bash “user design” for conflating these basic

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conceptual distinctions may add needed reflexivity in some quarters of human-centered design. To bash considering users as only “scenic features” may do so in other quarters. Yet taking the potentially conflating character of “the user” seriously, we argue, is key to untangling another set of often tangled facets of human-centered design that persist in the relation between design organizations and people who appropriate design.

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74 2. The user, use and design By taking the notion of the user seriously, we do not mean reinstating the well-argued case for studying the potential adopters as grounding for design. We mean taking seriously that the factual referent of “the user” even in human-centered design studies is strictly speaking never the flesh and blood person or people “out there.” The user refers to a relation, not to subjects or features of design space per se. It bridges between people out there and a rendition of them that is relevant for design. This is readily visible in reports and outcome briefings that designers, marketing departments and so on produce. The reports of “out there” reality are quite different from what anthropology, psychology, or sociology would produce of the same people. Their studies are conducted for other aims, and indeed, “patients,” “citizens,” and “natives” are equally relational terms and equally edited renderings for particular purposes[2]. This proposition is not new or particularly radical. Anthropology standardly notes how its research is equally about the familiar (home) and the strange (the field) (Geertz, 1973; Latour and Woolgar, 1979). But what is interesting, and perhaps even a little radical, is to examine, what then is specific about the relation that “the user” foregrounds for it precisely blurs the basic conceptual distinctions: The “user” is a complex idea: on the one hand, it is a category used by engineers and developers to refer to those who may eventually use their systems, on the other it can refer to a range of other individuals and institutions, imagined and real, some of which begin to develop various kinds of engagement with a technology over time (Stewart and Hyysalo, 2008).

The blurring becomes most evident in that the birth of the user of a technology-in-themaking can predate, even by decades, the first actual people to form a direct using relationship with it (Flichy, 2007a, b; Höyssä and Hyysalo, 2009). Many technologies remain with these envisioned users and never find their way to their (hoped for) flesh and blood counterparts. This does not mean that such users would be irrelevant or illusory. The users of not-launched technologies are often elaborated in great depth in product descriptions and requirements specifications, and prototypes adjusted meticulously to their needs. Because of the real consequences for requirements and projects, this sense of the user is very real to designers in a psychological, social, and often material sense, even if a year later another understanding of the user has replaced it or the technology project has been scrapped altogether. The notion of user, hence, refers to imagined, implicated, potential or real people, who are or could be using a designed object (artifact, technology, product, service, or infrastructure)[3]. It refers to the result of a particular relation, an engagement that people come to form with objects in the course of their appropriation, their “usership” (Helgesson and Kjellberg, 2009; Redström, 2008; Hyysalo, 2007). Yet out of this relation it foregrounds a design-oriented rendering of how people act, think, and experience artifacts – and it is not “just” about realized use.

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3. User, its representational existence We find it useful to differentiate between the strictly speaking representational existence of the user (user representations, be these mental, social, material, or bodily) and the lived existence of people who interact with technology (flesh and blood user, someone who has or had a relationship to the technology). This is not least because flesh and blood usership is an emergent relationship that requires attending to use situations (Helgesson and Kjellberg, 2009; Hennion, 2007; Hyysalo, 2007; Redström, 2008), yet these same flesh and blood people have user representations of themselves and of others in relation to a range of present and future technologies even before they have factually become users of these technologies. User representation is hence a way to keep those “basic definitions” clear without obfuscating the user as just one or other aspect of its relational existence. This distinction also repositions human-centered design, not as the practice whose task is to represent (any and all relevant) use, but as one (perhaps more skilled and more responsible) practice among others involved with representations of use. At this we can usefully turn to research on user representation initiated by social studies of technology (Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2003). Its early studies highlighted how the referent of “the user” was not necessarily any person out there, but often derived from developers’ own imagination and professional priorities (Agre, 1995; Akrich, 1995; Cooper and Bowers, 1995; Woolgar, 1991; Sharrock and Anderson, 1994). Research since has revealed that the dominant source for designing the user has much more variety, up to 30 different sources being cited as a key source of a user in particular design projects. This current body of research helps address how designers as professionals “who anticipate use” are positioned in R&D organizations (Hyysalo, 2010; Konrad, 2008; Kotro, 2005; Williams et al., 2005), the importance of materiality in user representations and their ties with different professional ways of knowing ( Johnson, 2013; Kotro, 2005) and investigating in detail the processes and operationalizations of user representations in design (Buur and Sitorus, 2007; e.g. Hyysalo, 2010; Ylirisku, 2013). Below we briefly review each of these research lines in turn[4]. We suspend the real thrust of our argument until Section 7 where we directly address what implications user as a relational category has to some persistent tangles in human-centered design. 4. User, the sources of The designing of prospective use appears to be fundamentally “representation hungry” in that it is hard to cater for all the information needed for the hypothetical future practices and desires that people may have related to a given new product. Research suggests that the missing information is sought from wherever it its available, and designers or engineers are seldom alone in prefiguring the use of any more novel or complex products (Sharrock and Anderson, 1994; Hyysalo, 2010). When we examine in-depth research on design and development projects with regard to the dominant source of user representation, we can note that in many cases significant user representations come from where one might expect: explicit requirement-gathering techniques, such as market or customer research, focus groups, interviews, expert panels, customer databases, literature reviews and so on, increasingly adjoined with arrays of usability and design centered methods. Various forms of users’ direct involvement in development activities have increased as well, both in co-design, in the testing of early beta and later pilot versions of the technology, as well as in co-creation of eventual service or product (Heiskanen et al., 2010; Johnson, 2013; Pollock and Williams, 2008; Righi and James, 2007).

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But this is not the whole picture. Designers “implicit” user representations, such as using oneself as a reference (Akrich, 1995; Oudshoorn et al., 2004; Ylirisku et al., 2013), are also common. In-depth personal experience of doing users’ activities while designing for these activities can be a powerful resource, such as in Kotro’s (2005) case study of outdoor people designing for other outdoor people. Designers equally draw implicitly from generic visions about the future (for instances the paperless office, telecommuting), particularly as focussing points and proxies for what the users’ context will look like by the time the product is launched (Flichy, 2007b; Konrad, 2006; Van Lente and Rip, 1998). Moreover, professionals and designers draw from the their own professional imagery (Becker, 1998, pp. 10-20), such as folklore about users or their professional acquaintance with user communities ( Johnson, 2007; Woolgar, 1991). While human-computer interaction (HCI) and interaction design suggest that principles from cognitive psychology and usability principles should provide the bulk of this implicit imagery (ISO 9241-210, 2010; ISO/TR 16982, 2002), in-depth ethnographic research on over 30 European ICT projects showed that, at the turn of the millennium at least, virtually nowhere were they used as the key input for designing usage (Miettinen et al., 2003; Williams et al., 2005). Rather, decisions about users and usages were discerned through examining the solutions found in previous products and services and by making use of established design patterns, code libraries, software architecture frameworks, application programming interfaces, and rapid application development tools. These tools are all created for a certain design-use context and their use imposes characteristics from that context on the current design situation, in effect configuring both users and designers to some extent (Mackay et al., 2000)[5]. Designs typically build also on “cultural maturation,” widespread media and technology genres, which can be assumed to be familiar to users (du Gay et al., 1997). Culturally established categories such as “movie,” “telephone call,” or “web page” provide conventions for bridging design and use (du Gay et al., 1997; Williams et al., 2005), as do more restricted digital artifact genres, such as automated teller machine, an editing program, or an instant messaging application, which are equally recognizable to next to all of us (Löwgren and Stolterman, 2004). As generalized appropriation experience, such conventions, images, “grammars,” and narrative structures can be trusted by designers to be de-coded in fairly nuanced ways. Business concepts further imply some rather than other users, uses and usages, rather than this relation going only the other way round. Sunk investment in infrastructure invites finding new uses and users for such infrastructure, such as cable network providers focussing solely on interactive TV applications for private households that were connected to the cable during 2000s (Konrad, 2008). The potential size of the market can lead to user representations, such as a safety phone for “+65 seniors” rather than “+85 seniors” built against evidence that the former do not feel the need to use such products (Hyysalo, 2010). Following competitor offers and features has been documented to short-circuit any feedback from customers in rapidly changing areas, such as at the peak of e-commerce system development around the turn of the Millennium (Konrad, 2008). Revenue models can come to imply user representations too, such as in the early phases of an online community for teenagers, Habbo Hotel, where the developers first created an SMS-based micro-payment system for a snow-war game and later applied it more successfully to buying furniture and decor in a hotel ( Johnson, 2013). Regulatory demands present another key source for user representations. Compliance with medical validations have resulted in target group specification and

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re-specification as well as in inventing new customer segments (Hyysalo, 2010; Lehenkari, 2000). A need to obtain reliable test results on the capacity of technology can reduce heavily the diversity of considered user representations (Neven, 2011). The prospects of gaining the labels and certificates needed to approach particular customer segments similarly affect how the users of a technology become represented (Hyysalo, 2010). Privacy regulations in social media typically also offer representations of the preferred relations between different users (data subjects) (Bylund et al., 2010). These dominant sources of user representation can be clustered to eight major source areas, with subcategories (see Figure 1). Such variety of major sources of user representation provides us with a rather different portrait of how users and usages are arrived at during product design from that resulting from any of the endorsed scopes of research in requirements gathering, marketing, human-centered design, or participatory design. The longitudinal biography approach used by Pollock and Williams, Hyysalo, and Johnson (Hyysalo, 2010; Johnson, 2013; Pollock and Williams, 2008; Johnson et al., 2014; Pollock and Hyysalo, 2014), has also allowed scrutiny of the same technologies at several loci and in multiple time frames of analysis in an over a decade long time-span. In all cases studied representations of use and users were incorporated from nearly all of the major directions identified above. User representations appear to stem from different concerns and corners of a development organization and its partnership networks. Indeed, different sources of user representation tend to rise from different ways of knowing and have different material carriers. Kotro’s research on Wristtop computer • Common sense • Personal experience • Folklore and visions • I-methodology

DESIGNER AS CITIZEN • Professional trends • Prior projects • Modes of working • System priorities

DESIGNER AS PROFESSIONAL

• Interface genres • Artifact genres • Product categories • Expectations

CULTURAL MATURATION

PARALLEL TECHNOLOGIES

• Feature sets • User interface solutions • Heuristics of building • Traditions of reliability

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• In-house user experts • Consumer panels • Co-design workshop • Lead-user

USER INVOLVEMENT

REQUIREMENTS GATHERING

• Market studies • Interviews • Observations • Expert panels

BUSINESS CONCEPTS • Business model • Revenue model • Roadmap • Investor demands

REGULATORY DEMANDS

• Health and Safety • Labels and Certificates • Standards • Privacy

Figure 1. Major categories and illustrative subclasses for dominant sources of representations of use found in technology design projects

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development processes highlights this aptly. The developer company Suunto’s marketing department built their understanding of markets and users through following trade, sports and fashion journals, marketing studies, etc., and they materialized these understandings into trend depictions. Meanwhile engineers in the same company built their understandings through following competitors’ R&D strategies, their development efforts and by reverse engineering competing products. “Their user” in turn was materialized in, for instance, requirements specification and specifications of available component technologies. In addition, different professional skills were involved, such as trend analysis of trade journals or reverse engineering competitors’ hardware (Kotro, 2005). The materiality of user representations is often built purposefully to aide effective use and assessment (Hartswood et al., 2002; Mattelmäki et al., 2011). Product developers create various explicit user representations to communicate the findings of user research: use cases, user requirements, persona descriptions (Cooper, 1999; Pruitt and Adlin, 2006), scenarios (Carroll, 1995), context of use models ISO 9241-210, 2010), workflow/task/artifact models (Beyer and Holtzblatt, 1998), and business models (Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2010). Such mediating representations (mediating models) are differently compatible with and inviting to the incorporation of other types of user representations and different kinds of knowing. The above discussion indicates that the range, kind, and background of user representations that are circling around a given development project tend to be many. “User knowledge” does not only emanate from user experts and “other knowledge” from other professionals. Neither is it the case that (human-centered) designers would have their “design knowledge,” “professional knowledge” and a separate body of “user knowledge” that originates only from the future adopters. Indeed, designers have begun to take issue with such simplified understanding of what “human” in humancentered design means, not least because it denies many of the implicit forms of knowing the users, the very area that designers have prowess in (Cockton, 2012; Löwgren and Stolterman, 2004). This further entails that the relation of users and design is not a simple question of “impact” or “operationalization” of user research, but an issue of mutual relations and interactions between different user representations, artifacts that carry them, and people related to the design project with their own specific ways of knowing and materializing of their knowledge (Figure 2). User research appears, therefore, to be more complexly intertwined into the design organization than, e.g. UCD standards would like it to be, with the elaborate recipes for how to “drive” user research and its results in organization shooting somewhat off the mark (Beyer and Holtzblatt, 1998; Kuniavsky, 2003). 5. User, within design and development Opening the issue of how any explicit user representation link to other user representations within the design organization opens up the question of how user representations relate to each other during design and development lifecycles. Above, we imply that some user representations can be complementary, some have conflicting relations, and some concern such different areas in the product that they may remain unconnected. Yet others can remain as contextual or legitimizing features (Martin et al., 2007). Trade-offs between manifold border conditions, requirements, and properties is everyday work in design (Gedenryd, 1998; Schön, 1983). Separation of concerns through compartmentalization, modularization, etc., is one of the principal

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User Research

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R&D ORGANIZATION

DESIGNER AS CITIZEN

USER INVOLVEMENT

REQUIREMENTS GATHERING

DESIGNER AS PROFESSIONAL User Research

BUSINESS CONCEPTS

CULTURAL MATURATION

PARALLEL TECHNOLOGIES

REGULATORY DEMANDS

Notes: What the existing sources may be varies from project to another

activities involved (Cross, 2008; Ulrich and Eppinger, 1995). But how user representations are raised to the fore in situated design action still rests on relatively scant knowledge. Let us examine this first in the design, then the development, and finally the industry lifecycle. Within the cycle of a design project, Hyysalo (2010) examined the trajectories of user representations from initial user research, customer feedback, business plans and previous product version, to the characteristics of a new design version of a safety-monitoring device for the elderly. Most user representations circling around the R&D projects were simply edited out. They were never brought in to the design process through materials, process detail, resourcing, or even talk. The representations that did enter design work were ones that were supported by business concerns or technical possibilities/restrictions, and other representations about use and users. The entry of user representations into the design discussion thus presented a strongly simplified version of the user or usage concerns such that these could be

Figure 2. User research’s impact seen as that driven into the organization (upper image) and as an interaction within complexly intertwined existing sources of user representation (lower image)

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directly relevant to the design consideration at hand[6]. The representations then went through a series of operationalizations and adjustments in the course of an industrial design process. Some representations “accumulated,” that is, gained more impetus and thrust often because of their mutually reinforcing relation with other user representations and compatibility with key technical or economic considerations. Other user representations, even though agreed to be significant by all design team members, went through a trajectory of “erosion,” wherein they received gradually less priority and room in the design. The process view of how user representations interrelate also applies to longer design time spans. Johnson studied the dynamics of user involvement in large social media service for teenagers, Habbo Hotel ( Johnson, 2013). The study spanned the development from the first prototypes with its hundreds of registered users in 2000, to over 15 million users globally in 2010, revealing that the developers used 26 major ways to generate user representations during this time (Table I). These forms of user involvement were shaped both by the changes in the service context and what knowledge the service developers already had about the users. In contrast to typical psychology-based approaches in HCI, the key criterion for user representations was not fixed over time nor set to understanding users and their practices per se, but rather reflected how valid (useful, even inspirational) the information was for the design and business concerns at each twice-a-year release. Similar layering and strategic ordering of modes of user engagement was found by Elgaard Jensen (2013) at the Danish medical aid company Coloplast. Here, also, the informal close connection between developers was complemented with new means to enhance responding to strategic R&D targets. “Sisterly empathy,” Clinical testing, External Market Surveys, End-user focus groups, Expert Panels, Workplace observations, Usability lab, Internal prototyping boards, Personal ostomy friends program, and the Coloplast Ostomy Forum followed each other in the methods arsenal of the company in responding to business goals and the availability of new approaches to engaging with users. Finally, many user representations do not stop at the company door, let alone stay inside a project room. As Konrad notes “[t]hese conceptions may be specific for individual actors, small actor groups or they may be part of the social repertoires of larger communities of actors, e.g., within a technological field” (Konrad, 2008, p. 7). Her research on the evolution of use and user representations of interactive television and early e-commerce describes the extremes. Interactive TV rested on user representations that remained remarkably stable internationally from the 1970s to

Concept 1999-2000

Table I. First occurrences of user involvement methods by service evolution phase

β 2001-2003

Volunteer forum, Weekly news-letters and polls, Fansites, Official Fanzine, Summer meetings, Sales statistics, Customer service Source: Johnson (2013, p. 98) Avatar activities, Developers as users, Informal evaluations, E-mail feedback, Volunteers

Expansion 2004-2005

Complexity 2006-2007

Competition 2008-2010

Market survey, Focus groups, Usability evaluation, Payability testing, CRM system, Release pilots

Online user panel, Global youth survey, User and group homepages, Tags

Data mining, Automated surveys, User experience testing, Personas

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2000s, even as local pilot projects had a somewhat different interpretation of them. In the e-commerce projects, representations of users, uses, and desired features evolved, mostly following international development and competitor offerings. The developers did not pause to wait for potential users to adopt the latest version and establish new use practices, but went on to develop new versions while older versions were being implemented (Konrad, 2008, p. 21). An important facet here was users’ own use representations, which evolved equally rapidly and followed the same international evolution of representations what were adequate system features and usages. Campagnolo (2013) similarly emphasizes the importance of users’ user representations as constitutive of shaping demand and feedback to developers. Having now reviewed some of the emerging empirical findings about the representational existence of the user, let us now move to examine what implications they have for human-centered design. 6. User, and its yield for human-centered design In the course of this paper we have sought to clarify the reality of user as a relational category and reviewed some of the related empirical research. We now wish to turn to its practical implications through a set of propositions about often-lamented issues that decrease the effectiveness of human-centered design. We thus point to options that open up when: (1) It is difficult to assess what is news and what is not in the user studies or what new knowledge is needed. Design critics of UCD commonly lament that user studies produce information already known to designers (Cockton, 2012), and fail to provide design insights that are truly needed. UCD practitioners in turn commonly lament how little investigation is possible within project constraints. By expanding the user studies landscape via the notion of user representations, it becomes clear that human-centered design representations of the user are not the only ones in any design organization. All user representations build on experiences and interpretations of design and appropriation of previous artifacts – be they everyday, professional learning or scientific inquiry. The relative adequacy of a given source appears to differ with regard to what kind of constellation between design and use has prevailed over time, how effective and extensive social learning processes have been to date, how much the development project at hand differs from earlier ones, and what kinds of instruments are available to facilitate the articulation, and finally, what is strategically important knowledge to generate. User representations can be used as a vocabulary to elaborate and communicate these understandings and link them to determining what new information is needed from user studies and which aspects of the extant information need verifying. Being able to elaborate the key user representations that prevail in the design project, company, and/or technological field could, in principle, greatly facilitate the positioning and uptake of whatever user representations user researchers offer. On the one hand, this opens opportunities for commissioning user research. It should help to provide user researchers a relatively encompassing set of user representations to start off with so that they can position their findings more accurately to what the development team thinks about the user (alternatively when truly “non-positioned” results are desired, the company should be very clear about this in its commission, to avoid the likely guesswork about what

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information may be useful). On the other hand, human-centered designers could increase their effectiveness by not just going out and studying some people, but departing by positioning the design project at hand with regard to user representations that will affect it anyhow. The key issues to enquire are what are dominant user representations within the project, development organization and the industry field, and how they may be changing, i.e. how do they relate to project, development, and industry lifecycles. (2) Companies act against the results of user research or disregard them, and it is difficult to argue which understandings of the user are adequate and which are not. UCD practitioners appear to face frequent challenges in advocating their view and findings in design organizations, judged by, for instance, the “common last chapter” in UCD books, which provides tricks for how to advocate UCD findings and overcome incredulity in one’s own organization (Beyer and Holtzblatt, 1998; Kuniavsky, 2003; Preece, 2002; Snyder, 2003). Given that it is rare (if not impossible) to ground all design decisions in user data, others in the same design organization will also continue to have their own ideas about products and users – and equally continue to get them incorporated within products. What these collections of tricks do tell us is that advocating “truth from the outside” might more fruitfully be replaced by dialogue over different user representations and their sources and grounding. Used in this manner, understanding “user” through the notion of “user representations” provides support for cross-functional discussion and decision making in various product and product family boards. (3) The uptake of human-centered design studies does not find itself adequately into products, or the core insights and requirements about users become compromised during technical design. The bag of tricks for advocating UCD within an organization is paralleled with another one that is driving its results through technical realization. Use of design rationales, project reviews, etc., have their known shortcomings (Righi and James, 2007; Schaffer, 2004). User representation studies provide a vocabulary for the inevitable transformation of use related aspects that takes place in the course of the realization of a product or service during the design process, its “chain of translation” (Latour, 1999). The vocabulary helps to underscore how different materializations are differently compatible with, and inviting to, the incorporation of other types of user representations and different kinds of knowing. This could help in arguing why UCD reviews or consultations need to be regular and set out in sensible manner during technical design (to avoid the detrimental level of erosion or accumulation of some key user representations). A focus on transformations of user knowledge during technical design may also help practitioners devise new means for clever UCD engagement during technical design work. (4) User research is limited to superficial aspects of the product design only (such as look and feel), or its effective deployment would mean questioning the assumptions and processes that govern how R&D is being done at a company. This concern has been voiced in many attempts to integrate UCD to software development methods (Cooper, 2003; Lauesen, 2005; Mayhew, 1999; Seffah et al., 2005; Wixon and Ramey, 1996), as well as by the manifestos for entirely

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re-organizing company R&D to become human centered to the core (Beyer and Holtzblatt, 1998). Focus on user representations entails an emphasis such that representing users is not limited to epistemic issues, but underscores organizational and professional power play and interactions including decision-making bodies, factions, interests, coalitions, inclinations, and strategizing. Seeking to convey “neutral and reliable” information is just one strategy to persuasion in the making of design decisions. Critical, value-sensitive and participatory design have developed means for assessing and positioning user-driven efforts to such organizational realities (Bødker et al., 2004). Our work on user representations underscores that making them visible is to invite scrutiny (Foucault, 1995), and this also goes for the more powerful actors. The adequacy of engineers’, CEOs’, or marketing department’s user representations can be brought to joint deliberation only if they are surfaced and not exercised covertly. Indeed, many designers and user advocates do not have the mandate or courage to question organizationally powerful occupational groups’ ideas about users. Making them visible with seemingly neutral tools and presentation mediums can then help to drive the process without being pushy beyond one’s position and accepted limits of inquisitiveness set by, e.g. IPR. (5) Human-centered designers are typically hired to provide the best understanding of the user for development activities and act as user advocates within the development organization, but seldom given sufficiently center stage to do so (Righi and James, 2007; Kuniavsky, 2003). As is evident from the four previous four points we suggest human-centered design could take a more extended role in brokering between the multiplicity of user representations: seeking responsibility over the overview understanding of users in development organization and its skillful management. This would present a more strategic or management function role governing market, customer, developer, stakeholder, etc., representations of current and future users and be inclusive of both the times and moments where the user is taken as the topic of design as well as when users are evoked as “scenic” or “contextual” features of the design space for creating new objects (Sharrock and Anderson, 1994; Martin et al., 2007). Affecting these latter modes where users mostly feature as typifications or derivatives of technology’s characteristics (Sharrock and Anderson, 1994; Hyysalo, 2010) may also call for efforts in seeking to build user-oriented ideology, capacity, and organizational culture rather than knowledge alone. The overview function is further needed for bridging user representations in prior design to those that emerge through and after implementations and in ensuing redesigns ( Johnson, 2013; Johnson et al., 2014). These later moments and sites of design are often crucial for realizing the eventual value points and characteristics of technology (Voss et al., 2009; Karasti et al., 2010; Pollock and Williams, 2008; Botero and Hyysalo, 2013) yet commonly conducted by different actor groups and in somewhat changed contexts, resulting in discontinuities in design decisions and its underlying knowledge base (Stewart and Hyysalo, 2008; Hyysalo, 2009). Our propositions in this section rest on the ideal of a “somewhat reasoned deliberation” in design organizations. We do not invite some form of “über-reflective design” or “paralysis by analysis” but rather seek to bring clarity or “guideposts” to the issues about “the user” and user research that practitioners both wittingly and unwittingly

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grapple with. Certainly, many human-centered design projects simply cannot or cannot afford to enquire deeper into the sets of user representations that circle around the development project. But often the most important representations are right there and readily observable or are even a matter of asking. Our message, hence, concerns at least as much the management of human-centered design: human-centered efforts are only as good as they can get to be. 7. Concluding remarks By sharpening the definition of the user and focussing on user representations and the processes that create, maintain, and transform them, we can reframe human-centered design and user research in a way that hopefully increases their relevance to and uptake in design organizations. We argue that equating user with “people out there” might have been necessary in the early days of UCD to gain needed legitimacy for human-centered efforts. Now that this legitimacy is there, the pendulum of attention need to be swung back to the design organization, to the other end of the user relation. This does not mean reverting to the old “designers don’t need to study users” (NO!), but refining the human-centered efforts further. A first step is to bring in the diversity of user representations that flow in design organizations. Co-design workshops, videos of users in their use context, user requirements, scenarios, and persona descriptions are but a few user representations. Use and users are equally shaped by business concepts, regulatory demands, parallel technologies, cultural maturation of interface genres and expectations, designers’ professional knowledge, and common sense. This diversity of user representations allows a reframing of user research from a focus on the everyday life of users to the relationship between use and design. It means a rethinking of the field site: it is not only “out there,” but just as much inside the design organization. It means starting from existing user knowledge of developers, marketing people, managers, and other relevant stakeholders. It means constructing an overview of established user representations, considering which are mainstream and which are marginal. It means thinking of user research as an intervention to established mainstream user representations and locating the field study and field site with these prerequisites. A relational understanding of “the user” and a distinction between user representations and engaged use help decipher the dynamics by which the postlaunch interpretation and appropriation of new technology is anticipated during the design and planning processes before market launch. Audience reactions are anticipated by active representational work that links different aspects of novel objects to their respective social contexts (regulation, business, technology, usages) and often, by proxy, to those parts of the development organization that (assumedly) hold competence in the area. This anticipatory representational work in design “endogenises” (a part of the) audience interpretations, rendering them manageable as part of the communication involved. Indeed, the user (as a relational entity) is one of the means designers use to accomplish how potential problems of interpretation can be identified and expressed. The question, however, is not so much what an isolated product or product feature might mean (Crilly et al., 2008, p. 440), but how their meaning becomes constituted within the circuits of production and consumption (du Gay et al., 1997; Pollock and Williams, 2008; Hyysalo, 2010), and how these are further enmeshed in product, company, and industry lifecycles as well as in user practices.

Notes 1. Social Actor, Participant, Stakeholder, Actor, Role holder, Utilizer, Subject, Human, and Agent are among the usual alternatives given.

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2. For those doubting how significantly human-centered design efforts edit the reality they study, we advise acquaintance with the total observation exercises of the 1950s (for overview see Becker, 1998, pp. 67-83). Less academically we might entice any potentially doubting reader to mark down all those moments s/he personally thinks him/herself as a user during the day. For us at least, those moments are rare, we rather mostly do or contemplate things with objects rather than feel our existence reduced to user relations. So while there is no doubt that “user” is a members’ category, it is seldom a category people use of themselves, rather one they use of others (with technology and predominantly in designing or producing it). 3. As is commonly categorized, we also see this including those who directly operate the technology often called direct or primary users, as well as those who provide feeds to the technology, who help keep it working, or whose actions are directly affected by the technology, even if they do not directly operate it or use it only in rare intervals; i.e. those often called secondary users. There are also those implicated by the use of the technology such as patients, whose bodies are penetrated by the use of surgical instruments without the patients doing anything much with the instruments. The cleaner of the surgical premises is another implicated user, as s/he may is never even be aware of the instruments used, although they affect the kinds of mess and kinds of hygiene s/he has to deal with. Such implicated or simply co-present characters may or may not be characterized as users depending on the heuristic used to identify users. 4. Our earlier work documents some sources of user representations in more detail, see Hyysalo (2009, 2010), so here we emphasize key recent additions and otherwise resort to a more concise overview. 5. It is not a good or bad thing, but unavoidable that tools make certain things easier and other things more difficult for a developer; the skill lies in choosing the right combination of tools for the situation at hand, see Williams et al. (2005). 6. Ylirisku (2013) documents similar pattern in several other cases of industrial design.

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Van Lente, H. and Rip, A. (1998), “Expectations in technological developments: an example of prospective structures to be filled in by agency”, in Disco, C. and van der Meulen, B. (Eds), Getting New Technologies Together: Studies in Making Sociotechnical Order, de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 203-229. Voss, A., Hartswood, M., Procter, R., Rouncefield, M., Slack, R.S. and Büscher, M. (2009), “Configuring User-Designer Relations – Interdisciplinary Perspectives”, Springer, London. Williams, R., Stewart, J. and Slack, R. (2005), Social Learning in Technological Innovation: Experimenting with Information and Communication Technologies, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. Wixon, D. and Ramey, J. (1996), Field Methods Casebook for Software Design, Wiley Computer Pub, New York, NY. Woolgar, S. (1991), “Configuring the user: the case of usability trials”, in Law, J. (Ed.), A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, Routledge, London, pp. 57-102. Ylirisku, S. (2013), “Frame it simple. Towards a Theory of Conceptual Designing, doctoral dissertation, Aalto University, Helsinki. Ylirisku, S., Lindley, S., Jacucci, G., Banks, R., Stewart, C., Sellen, A., Harper, R. and Regan, T. (2013), “Designing web-connected physical artefacts for the ‘aesthetic’ of the home”, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’13, ACM, New York, NY, pp. 909-918. Further reading Latour, B. (1991), “Technology is society made durable”, in Law, J. (Ed.), A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, Routledge, London, pp. 103-131. About the authors Sampsa Hyysalo is an Associate Professor in Co-Design at the Aalto School of Arts, Design and Architecture and Senior Researcher at the School of Business. His research focusses on user involvement in design and innovation processes. He holds a PhD in behavioral sciences and a docentship in information systems, specializing in user-centered design. He has written next to 30 peer review articles and five books, most recent being health technology development and use: from practice-bound imagination to evolving impacts (Routledge, 2010, New York). Professor Sampsa Hyysalo is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: sampsa. [email protected] Dr Mikael Johnson is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, a Joint Research Institution of the Aalto University and the University of Helsinki, Finland. Mikael has worked as interaction designer and software engineer in a range of projects. His research focusses on user-centered design, strategic user involvement, social media, and energy use. His doctoral thesis at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Aalto University, focussed on how social media changes user-centered design.

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