Charles B. Kreitzberg wrote:
However, I do not think of UCD as "a collection of techniques" or even the
'act of "thinking of users." To me it is a philosophy that grew out of the
dissatisfaction that many felt with the way software was being developed
in
the early days of computing. Much software was (and sadly still is)
designed
by programmers who were not successful in producing usable or desirable
products. Much design was also mandated by business people who made
decisions based on what pleased them or would forward their specific
business goals. Sadly, this too often happens.
I've been mistified by the last few threads here, and until Charles'
comments I wasn't entirely sure why.
It's worth nothing that a near majority of breakthroughs in what we consider
good interface design were driven by people with none of the trainings or
backgrounds we obsess about here. They would almost all describe themselves
primarily as programmers, engineers or entrepreneurs.
That list includes:
The Xerox Parc folks
The Macintosh Team
Tim Berners-Lee (Inventor of the web)
Doug Englebart (Inventor of the mouse)
The Mosaic team
The founders of Digg, Google, Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, ...
and on it goes
Yet somehow we're all still very fond of finding ways to exclude who should
be leading this or in charge of that, or decreeing what pile of methods and
degrees is best for creating the future that we want, despite tons of
evidence that great design movements were driven by people with none of
these things.
Yes, programmers and business people can mess things up - I do agree with
you Charles. But they're also on the list of people that made the big leaps
in design and UI happen. I find it hard to think of big moves forward in the
UI world led by people who would primarily call themselves designers, IAs,
IXDs, or whatever. (Anyone have a reference for a good history of UI
breakthroughs? that would prove me right or wrong quickly)
For a bunch of creatives we can be pretty damn narrow minded - there is
clearly a talent we don't talk about much than enables some people to find
great design insights without the 100 piece toolkit of methods and degrees
we obssess about. And these people without our pedigrees are highly
represented in the tradition we believe we'd like to follow.
But my point is not to throw the methods and degrees away. And I'm not
advocating that the answer is to bet everything on people with no training.
Instead my point is the fact that we have a system doesn't mean there aren't
other systems to achieve the same ends. Just because we prescribe a year of
usability studies and six interaction designers with masters degrees to
achieve a result, doesn't mean there aren't two very talented kids in a
basement who can't make something almost as good, or better in some ways, in
half the time.
We should be studying how people with little of *our* training and expertise
are able to achieve what they did - we might just learn ways to refine our
fancy IxDA/IA/UCD/HCI/XYZ view of the world into something closer to the
core of what makes great designs possible. We've become numerous enough now
to be highly specialized, and specialization serves incremental change, not
innovation. One reason the big historic moves are driven by people without
our expertise is they're less likely to be bound to a prescribed set of
ideas, roles or methods in the way many of us have become.
-Scott
Scott Berkun
www.scottberkun.com
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