On Jan 15, 2008, at 9:47 PM, Jeff White wrote: > Who cares?! Because it was better than "developer centered, marketing > centered, designer centered, product management centered, etc"? UCD > makes better products in the vast amount of projects in which it's > used. That's a good thing.
People take the term "user centered" and use it to mean that the only thing that matters in product design are users. I can't tell you how many times I see people attempt to design products with little to no regard to how technology actually works or what the business needs to function for profit because they claim technology doesn't matter... only what the users want does. Or that the users needs and wants and desires trump the others. Why d they do this and how do they get away with it? Because the silly term for the process says so! It's User Centered Design after all. To me it's as maddening as when politicians call a bill "No Child Left Behind" or the "Clear Skies Act" when the bill itself is nothing of the sort. So it drives me nuts when people in the design field mislabel things. If "user centered" design is indeed not about centering (and focusing) on users, then by all means STOP calling it that and call it what it is already. And FWIW.... User centered is NOT better than engineering centered or marketing centered and doesn't make better products. It's just as fundamentally flawed as an extreme approach to anything. > To figure out what's of value, you can either sit in a black hole and > speculate, or you can go out and do some research and base it on that. > Speculation doesn't always fail, but it does fail much more than > basing design on the empirical evidence of how humans interact with > things. My two cents. Obviously. But if in that research you focus everything required to make a good product -- that being people, technology and business needs -- you end up with better products as long as you also have the right set of people designing and building them. I simply call it product design. User centered is an incredibly poor term foisted on the design world as a reaction to things that lacked any research at all. But like all extremes, especially in labeling, it tends to overeach. -- Andrei Herasimchuk Principal, Involution Studios innovating the digital world e. [EMAIL PROTECTED] c. +1 408 306 6422 ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
