On Feb 13, 2008, at 8:28 PM, Alan Cooper wrote: > Once you've learned how humans react, you no longer really need to > actually, physically test your designs. Your experience will tell > you just as dependably.
Except when the industry, technology, and humans continue to change. Times are changing and so are human reactions. The interesting thing about humans is that we do learn to adapt and adopt over time and so our reactions change over time. Designs that might not have initially worked, can work in the future. Designs that currently work now, may not be the best design in the future. How do you accommodate for innovation if we stop testing our designs? Do we just do what we know works and not try anything new? I can only partially agree with this, Alan. I would agree that we don't need to test designs that we know work based on experience (contextually speaking). However, I can tell you from first hand experience that my designs today are much better than my designs a few years ago, hell even last year, because I'm continually pushing them rather than relying solely on what I know worked last year. And I would bet that your design solutions today are not the same ones you used a few years ago either. Design evolves. Tags—how would your experience tell you how humans interact with something new like this? AJAX transitions in websites and web-based applications? These new concepts, new interactions, new models need to be prototyped and tested. Now once you've learned from that experience, you can apply that to new designs. However, I've personally seen changes to human reactions to things like tags in just the last year. So, while my initial reaction and experience would tell me "No, they don't work," I'm starting to see cases now where they do (even though I personally don't like them, but then again, my opinion is irrelevant when I've got data that says otherwise). Cheers! Todd Zaki Warfel President, Design Researcher Messagefirst | Designing Information. Beautifully. ---------------------------------- Contact Info Voice: (215) 825-7423 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AIM: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Blog: http://toddwarfel.com ---------------------------------- In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. ________________________________________________________________ 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
