User is NOT the king (TM)
Now, ladies and gentlemen, the S60 UE blog will switch to a sentimental mode for a moment. I’m going to get a bit personal [drumrolls, please!] as I’m going to tell you a few things about me. [Now where's all the applause?] As I’ve been enjoying this journey with Idean Creative and Idean Research, I’ve seen many upsides and downsides while marketing usability & user experience and the whole how-to-sell-something-abstract stuff. Take my word; this is not as easy it might sound. But it IS lots of fun. I might one day post something about marketing, but that’s a whole different story.
A six months ago or so I came up with a conclusion which you can see in the headline. To make it more clear I feel I have to tell you some background. Basically 6-7 years ago we started with really simple stuff and had this optimistic innovation that “world-should-be-better-and-more-usable-place” and “simply-we-will-make-that-happen”.
Four guys, one goal, 52883 ideas and different tracks to make it reality. And a feeling that we were alone in the dark. We were not happy with the tunes the usability world was dancing to. Too many usability gurus for too few people, talking about things too high-level. We desperately wanted to provide a way to actually develop more experiences to the users. But soon we realized that the time was too young to handle that (or the enterprises and organizations were). So, we decided that hey, let’s work out the usability things first and then we can reach the actual User Experience things. We assumed it would take some 1-2 years but we didn’t know the reality. Luckily.
Patience, please, I’m getting to my point. Among many others, we had one guiding line, one mantra, that we felt would describe our mission: “User is the King”…
We thought that hey, let’s put users to the middle of product development and make them develop products for our customers with our exceptionally talented people working alongside with the users. Add some magic to the mix - puff! - the perfect product.
Oh, how idealistic. Man, it was stupid.
Now listen, we DID (and still do;) lot’s of good work back then. I’m not selling you anything here, but I have to stress that we had hundreds of satisfied clients and everything was getting clearer and growing up to be more mature. But why? I’ll reveal the first secret: even though we said that User Is the King, we didn’t actually do that. We did all the focus groups, 1-to-1 tests, field observations, end-user-analysis and whatnot but we _didn’t_ allow them to act like the King. We didn’t ask them anything. We “just” observed and let them do - well, whatever users usually do with weird pieces of mobile software while observed by specialists. Still we said that the user should be the King but as I now look back, it just seems like a fast way to make our stuff easy-to-understand. And to make the project kick-off.
Now I say aloud: from now on, the user is NOT the king. Not any more.
And my second secret: the user is a Guru. The reasoning is quite simple - Kings make decisions, Gurus don’t. Users Do-Not-Make any decision, they just say what ever comes to their mind at the moment. Moreover, they say what they feel they _should_ say - but in real life they will do different things. That’s us, people.
Rather, users act like gurus who don’t make any decisions but just make cool vibrations and bring ideas and hype and all that stuff that we must throw in the mix to create the proper frames for successful User Experiences. So who is the King? You are! You, dear developer or operator or manufacturer or usability engineer, you are! You can’t leave the responsibility of making decisions to the users. Of course you could, but hey, we know what happens after that. As a developer, you’re the King who makes the rulings but you need to have the Gurus with you. It’s impossible to live without them. All good gurus need even better kings. And what is good with our gurus, they are going to buy your stuff!
I know, I could write a book about the sales pitches the UE folks are using. This was not one of them; I just wanted to share this with you because it’s really important for all of us to understand about the UE eco-system as it’s actually developing further. So, let’s have more about the “user-is-guru” ecosystem through discussion, let’s now develop something 
