The biggest misconception about user-centered design—which often comes from designers themselves—is that it means “Asking users what they want.” That couldn’t be further from the truth. Users rarely know what they want, never mind how to ask for it. Instead, it’s UX professionals’ job to observe and interview them to discover the different types of problems they encounter.

From there we can rank problems to be solved, think about how to solve them, and design and evaluate different solutions via iteration loops. We can even come up with completely new solutions to those problems. Being user-centered is not a hindrance to innovation. On the contrary, user-centered activities are innovation kickstarters.