When Alan Cooper delivered the opening keynote at Interactions08 this morning, I was once again struck by how sensible his view is. As I understood his core argument, it was:
1. We know that the best interactive products are not the first to market but the ones that have the best quality design. 2. Business managers often fail to understand this because they do not know how to manage "creatives" among whom he numbers both interaction designers and programmers. 3. The typical business approach is to develop requirements and then build the product. A better approach would be to have an interaction design team design the product concept and pass it on to the programming team. The programming team would then use the design as input to its own technical planning phase reaping a more focused and efficient build cycle. 4. Since business management does not recognize the importance of this, it is up to the interaction designers to begin the organizational change process. We would accomplish this by striking an alliance with the programmers who will value us as fellow craftspeople. This alliance would help transform the way products are developed. The environment that Alan describes is typical of large, non-software corporations whose IT departments continually struggle to stay in alignment with their business counterparts. Those who work in such corporations will probably resonate to this description. Those who work in Web 2.0 software companies or digital agencies may have a very different experience. I agree with Alan that design makes products great. But being first to the marketplace, means you designed your product without the benefit of examining, critiquing and learning from existing products and the reactions of users to them. Given that useful input it is not surprising that later entries improve on the initial ones. I've long advocated that that it is essential to design the product through an IxD process that largely precedes technical planning. TRhat's a great goal. But I am less optimistic than Alan about how easily we will be able to create an alliance with programmers. A recent survey by Information Week found that only 5% of IT people thought that Web 2.0 was of any value to their companies. Yikes! We still have a long way to go to educate the technical community. And I'm not sure that we won't have another hurdle to cross in convincing the Project Management Institute as well. I believe the lack of management support for creativity and craft comes less from management's being stuck in old style industrial thinking in a post-industrial society, as Alan suggests, then from unrelenting pressure from senior management. The price that executives pay for their substantial compensation is constant pressure to deliver profit to shareholders. That is pretty much their only focus and it cascades down to all management. To shift the way that products are managed, we need to position design activity as a revenue generator and profit enhancer and make that case to senior management. That is one reason that I've been arguing for the need to explain our value in simple terms. There is still a lot of selling to do. Charlie ________________________________________________________________ *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
