On 10/02/2008, Marc Rettig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [On Interaction08]
> THE MISSING TOPIC > It's this: we are a community supposedly driven by understanding of the > people who are affected by our work (that's PC for "our users"), but we > aren't talking about them very much. Hi Marc, I'm not there but judging by this group I see what for me is a constant challenge, that is the healthy separation for user needs and implementation concerns. In my mind getting the right amount of separation at the right time in a project makes a big difference. If you ignore implementation near the start of the project and think about user needs and what they want to do then you bring the users back into the equation and are building something that has purpose, focus and is user centered. You then start bringing in implementation, for example is it going to be a website and start designing against that. Start with implementation and you can build a wonderfully crafted application with superb engineering that does 100 things but few folks really can't be bothered to learn and give up when it doesn't do the 1 thing they really wanted. If you start by saying 'we're going to build a community based ajax based website' then in my mind you've descided you're going to use a hammer then are lookiing for things to hit with it and screws just become 'crinkle cut nails'. Whilst I have technical skills I know it's best to ignore then at the start of a project. Even if I know we have a set architecture to build against with some pre-build solutions letting that set what users are going to search for is backwards. By the sounds of it might be a problem that some folks are too implementation focused. I call this an engineer mindset, the want to solve the technical issues of how to create the final product whilst what I call a user experience mindset is more about determining what the users are looking to achive, what tasks they carry out regardless of existing solutions and then see what part of the tasks they carry out can be helped by some kind of tool or infomation source. It's about abstracting out the problem and not rushing to solution as many of us are forced to do. You point about most folks in US homes is well made, I think it's true the world over. Most of us are very atypical in terms of audience who use these sites. Sites like Digg are very geek biased and appeals to a minority (although the tech focus is dropping). Let's ensure we have a healthy disrespect for all technology! -- Stewart Dean ________________________________________________________________ *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
