A key implication of this paradigm shift in the organisation of work is that tomorrow's management landscape is likely to be very different for today's business leaders. Digital technologies such as mobile telephones, email, web conferencing and Skype are becoming the means by which business is transacted and communication is enabled between managers and their staff.
One of the consequences of these changes is that work is becoming more distributed and virtual, and more and more employees are working at a distance from those who manage them. Employees are working more flexibly organisational structures are changing organisations are downsizing and delayering and organisations are becoming more global. Huge changes are taking place in the world of work. The chosen approach of studying method mixes in an organization provided useful insights into understanding the user information sources in an organization.
In addition, knowledge based on user research and HCD methods does not replace other sources such as customer insight from marketing but, rather, complements these. The cumulation of user knowledge gained during the past projects and employment years is notably high among designers, product managers, projects, and in the company as a whole. HCD work is mostly accomplished through a combination of methods and other information sources on the users. The study shows that instead of conducting new user research or testing for each project, designers draw information from previous studies and other user insight sources in the company. Our longitudinal case study that is based on interviews, meeting observations, and company documentation was conducted at a high HCD-mature company. However, there has been growing amount of criticism towards this dominant orientation, as companies and designers seldom design services or products as entirely separate projects, let alone use single methods for doing so. The dominant orientation in HCD research has been to develop and validate individual methods. Human-centered design (HCD) has developed an impressive number of methods for gaining a better understanding of the users throughout the design process. In conclusion, the research results provide guidance for practicing HCD when direct contact with users is not possible. In addition, it underscores the importance of studying the HCD practices in real-life environments and highlights the importance of conducting research at the crossing of several research fields (here it was HCD, science and technology studies, and design and innovation research). This research further contributes to efforts to aid in assessing whether an organisation is applying HCD and how design can be recognised as HCD although there is seemingly no user contact. In addition, organisations can have more specific resources, such as the in-house users employed by the case company, that can provide additional input to the design and testing phases. In an HCD-mature organisation, user knowledge is drawn from a variety of sources and gathered through various methods and method mixes, and it has accumulated during the history of each employee. In the end it could be seen that HCD can be practiced responsibly without direct user contact in HCD-mature organisations.
In addition, a more holistic perspective on the ways HCD was practiced without direct user contact and an analysis of the ecologies of user knowledge were provided. The practices of HCD were viewed from the methods and user representations points of view. The research has been conducted during 2014–2019 through semi-structured interviews, meeting observations and inspected company documentation. This research is based on a longitudinal case study at a Finnish industrial company that has been a forerunner in HCD. These situations are quite common in organisational settings, and they can occur due to several reasons, such as not having enough time or other resources, too strict confidentiality issues or the user group cannot be contacted. This dissertation focuses on HCD and inspects whether HCD can be practiced without direct contact with users and, if so, what are the practices applied. For decades researchers and practitioners have developed ways to get user and customer input into product and service development and this has taken place under several different study fields, such as marketing, ergonomics, ethnography, participatory design, usability, human-centred design (HCD), user experience, service design, and science and technology studies. However, user involvement has had positive effects on system success and user satisfaction and can, therefore, clearly be seen to be valuable. Developing technologies and technological innovations is difficult and technological innovations often fail.
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