On Jan 21, 2008, at 1:12 PM, Robert Hoekman, Jr. wrote: > > The definition of UCD should include discussion of how it's > practiced. Same > for ACD, and so on.
Robert, I think you're grand and really smart. I love your work. But I think you gotta quit with the Activity-Centered-Design-Is- Better-Than-User-Centered-Design stuff. It's just not going anywhere, man. First, as you've discovered, there is no standard definition of User Centered Design. This is because the term doesn't stand alone. It's a relative term, originally coined to deal with people who designed things without ever considering users, their activities, or their needs. In those days, (and I was there when it was coined,) common practice was to create products with features, functionality, and interaction models that satisfied business goals without any attention to who used it, why they used it, or how they used it. So, by starting to talk about a user-centric process, people could communicate with the then designer-cum-programmer who was all about shipping code without actually thinking about use. And it basically worked. I've heard/read you go on and on about activity-centered design. (To be fair, I've been known to go on and on about things. In fact, I've been thinking about joining a support group about going on and on. It's called On And On Anon. :) ) To restate what I've heard from you when you start talking about activity-centric process, you say that the differences between users don't matter as long as you focus on the activity. That if you focus on activity, you cover the needs and create great designs without all the heavy lifting involved in studying differences in users. I think for some applications, that is correct. One I've heard you talk about is photographic sharing sites, like a Flickr.com or Photobucket.com. If you focus on the activities, such as uploading, designating "friends" to share with, printing, and manipulating photos (red-eye removal, cropping, rotation, color adjustment), it doesn't matter what the differences are. After all, uploading is uploading and printing is printing, no matter how smart, tall, or redheaded the user is. To some extent, I think you're correct about this. However, not all apps are the same. Imagine the same application, but not used by the general public, but instead professional photographers. Imagine the business, because they are a niche market, trying to go for as many specialties as possible: wedding photographers, industrial photographers, mall photo studio chains, and private photo studios that do yearbook pictures. Now the functionality and interface needs to change, not just because the business needs are different for each one, but because of the nature of the work. For example, where the person doing the uploading may be the photographer themselves in the wedding photographer instance, with the private studio it likely to be an assistant who has little photographic expertise (such as a part-time college student). Providing sophisticated image manipulation functionality for the former audience may be dangerous to the end product if provided the same way to the latter audience. Here, audience differences *do* matter and designing for them requires attention. Instead of constantly harking in a mine-is-better-than-yours format, why don't you start helping us understand how, as designers walking into a new project, we can begin to determine if we can get away with only applying budget and resources to activities, or if we're in one of these situations where we need to really think about the subtleties in user differences. (And don't cop out with a "you never need to think about user differences" answer, because you & I both know that isn't true. Never is never the right word. :) ) Hugs & kisses, Jared Jared M. Spool User Interface Engineering 510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845 e: [EMAIL PROTECTED] p: +1 978 327 5561 http://uie.com Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks ________________________________________________________________ *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
