PEOPLE-INSPIRED TECHNOLOGY DESIGN

People-oriented design is rapidly taking center stage in Intel's design strategies: it provides inspiration for new product ideas; and it informs strategies and technology roadmaps and guides their definition and development.

This outside-in approach to technology design, where technology is designed by first understanding how people will use the complete product or solution, starts with understanding people in their social and physical context. Understanding people is typically the role of ethnography and other social sciences. Although we often refer to people as users, in many instances we are also interested in discovering the needs of people who never used technology before. Envisioning and designing user experiences, products, and solutions is where interaction design, industrial design, and human factors engineering step into the driver's seat. These generate an understanding of what we imagine people will be using and how it should be implemented in order to be relevant to them. The user experience becomes the target of what we want to make possible for the user. This, in turn, drives constraints on the technology we design at Intel and those parts of the overall product solution provided by others in the industry. Setting early targets for user experience that are measurable in an unbiased way, and subsequent assessment of how our implementation measures up against those targets are the realm of user experience assessment, which adds the quality and validation aspect to people-oriented design.

So why does this ethnographic approach matter to a technology company? To put it simply, what's under the hood is only as relevant as the end user experience of the complete solution. Moreover, speed is no longer the sole measure of user satisfaction for our technology products: making the inners of computers faster, while still necessary, is no longer sufficient in today's marketplace.

The Early Beginnings

Individuals with a user-centered background first appeared in the employee ranks at Intel in 1993. They were psychologists hired as human factors engineers chartered with the design and usability of user interfaces for Intel's videoconferencing and communications products. Prior to that, the design of anything that was directly visible to human users of our products was typically assigned to the technical writer on the product. At that time, technical writers were the only people at Intel who produced parts of our technology products that people interacted with: written manuals. Since computer user interfaces involved text displayed to the user, much of which was also written about in the product's printed documentation, designing a user interface somehow didn't seem all that different.

The first study to use ethnographic techniques at Intel was conducted in 1994. It was a small project, pretty much kept below the radar. In this study, communication between people in corporations was examined, and the study generated an application idea very similar to what we know today as instant messaging. The Intel videoconferencing product version that would include that feature was never released.

A year later, a second small ethnography study was conducted on US families with young children. The study revealed that the PC in the home didn't add much value to a family's daily routine. Often stuck in a home office or den, the PC was placed where people weren't for most of their daily activities. Although this was not what we really wanted to hear, presentations on the subject around the company became an instant hit and gradually started to change conversations. A little later, ethnography became a formal, but still tiny, team on the Intel organization chart. That team was later renamed People And Practices Research, and in many ways, it was ground zero for a lot of the people-oriented leadership in the company at the time.

Today

Today, people-oriented innovation teams exist across the company. They work closely with marketing, planning, and engineering in shaping not only future technology products but also our internal Information Technology (IT) direction to bring similar benefits to the Intel workforce worldwide.

Designing technology with people in mind is key to Intel's platform strategy. We've come a long way from what used to be a small side act many years ago to what is now a lead role on the main stage with world-class actors. Yet, there's still a long road ahead before user-orientation is fully embedded in our company's DNA. That day will arrive when we stop talking about it as if it is something special.

Hope you enjoy this ITJ issue.