Design for Device or Design for User

As a user experience designer, one is always looking at things from a user point of view. That is well accepted in the industry and elsewhere now. Of late there has been a plethora of devices coming into the scene and majority of them have being driven by touch capabilities. This has resulted in a lot of designers starting to design for the device than design for the user. A few market leaders have also gone to the extent of saying (or atleast have been made to believe) that they do not rely on User Research anymore and just do things with conviction.

With the mobile phone becoming what the PC was a few years ago, the possibilities have increased n fold. There are applications being built everyday. The ease of putting things out there in the market place, open for a wide customer base to use it, has resulted in millions of stuff being built and often for users on whom the designers have not done any primary research. Moreover, the question arises that there are all of these being designed by designers or by anyone who has an access to the SDKs.

With User experience being adopted by many companies in early stages of their product development,  I reckon that there are a lot of people doing a bunch of stuff in the name of Design and User Experience Design in particular.

The only question I have is whether we are dying up on the user and relying more on the device. I hope not.

Today Came across a really interesting slide-share presentation today that was a part of a workshop on mobiles. They discuss about the spread of mobiles and how we are becoming more device dependent, in both our actions and the things we create. I just hope that we have more people create stuff for the user.

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