On Jan 25, 2009, at 8:14 AM, mark schraad wrote:
1) young or uninitiated designers that don't know better.
2) those that cannot or will not allocate resources for user research.
3) designers with extraordinary domain expertise... that can be
successful without user or market investigations specific to a project
4) designers who are largely designing for themselves, or people
just like themselves.
In this IxDA post: http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=35466 and in
this article: http://is.gd/gLAQ
I attempt to describe what we've seen in our research studying teams
over the past 10 years.
We've found it useful to break these different "decision styles" into
five categories: Unintended design, Self Design, Genius Design,
Activity-Focused Design, and User-Focused Design. (Note: I changed our
terminology from Activity-Centered and User-Centered, because those
terms carried baggage that we didn't intend when we were talking about
this, thus muddling the discussion.)
In your categorization, I'd consider #1 and #2 to likely be Unintended
Design, but it would be hard to tell without more study of the
specific design practice. (The other option is just "Poor Design",
whereby the team is just acting incompetently. As I recently
twittered: Competence is bounded but incompetence has no such
boundaries.)
#3 is what we'd call Genius Design, in that it leverages the existing
experience and knowledge of the design team without the need for
further research. We've seen this many times in our travels and have
come to believe it's a solid style that often has positive outcomes.
#4 is what we'd call Self Design. This can work really well in some
niches, such as musicians creating instruments that they themselves
will perform with. (Many don't know this but this is how Bill Buxton
got started in computers.) In our research, we've met surgeons who
created surgical tools and receiving dock managers who created
enterprise supply chain software.
In all these cases, a "good design" outcome is possible. However, our
early research results (we're still working on this, though we're
sharing a lot of it in our upcoming roadshow -- http://www.uie.com/events/roadshow/
) shows that the more informed the design decisions, the better the
end experiences for the users. Informed decisions can come from many
places, but rarely happen by accident.
Hope that helps,
Jared
Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
e: jsp...@uie.com p: +1 978 327 5561
http://uie.com Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks Twitter: jmspool
UIE Web App Summit, 4/19-4/22: http://webappsummit.com
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