Extreme User Centered Design: Methodology for Eliciting and Ranking Requirements in User-Centered New Product Development: Case Studies from Honduras and the Central African Republic

Designing appropriate technology for people in developing countries is a complex challenge. An unclear aspect of this design is fully understanding and ranking end user requirements, and then creatively designing a user-pulled product. Many methods have been proposed, but each omits end users as integral to the design process. Instead, designers identify the needs, ask the intermediary customers to rank the needs, evaluate correlations between the needs, and then use tools to optimize the product based on the ranked needs. The missing factor in this process is involving end users as co-designers. Currently many designers create prototypes based on intermediary customer inputs and then ask end users to select their favorites. This method could influence end users into selecting a design that is not completely end user pulled. Implementing changes at this stage of the development process is costly. Requirements must be pulled by end users, and not pushed onto them by the designer. Ownership is vital for end users in order for them to adopt a new product. The design methodology developed by this study is called Extreme User Centered Design (EUCD). Two projects inspiring the EUCD development will be discussed in this paper. The first project involves the design of a self-contained family-sized aquaponics system for people in Honduras. The second project involves the design of a manual water pump for the Central African Republic (CAR). This pump will replace an earlier pump that is no longer repairable with commercially available parts. Developing the EUCD process from these projects will require extensive investigation into new practices, where intermediary customers and end users have an important role.