Mark: Your comment...
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." ...is completely on target. I started as a programmer and migrated to UX because I was so enthralled by computers that I wanted to bring them to everyone. Sometimes I get frustrated by developers and by business people too. But being married to a business thinker, I've also learned how much depth there is to business as well. I believe that the most progress will be made when business, technology and user experience design are aligned and synergistic. That's why we need to share our vision with others in a constructive way and learn from them as well. One of my professional goals is to help developers understand the UCD (or whatever we want to call it) design approach. What I've realized is that to teach developers what I know, I need to learn from them as well. It's been a long time since I created code and the field has shifted so much that I've become almost technically illiterate where I once was competent. Like many on this list I value innovation. But I have learned, is that not everyone is an innovator. There are many competent people who want to understand how to do good design. They may not be breakthrough thinkers nor do they aspire to be. A lot of business people fit into that category. They want to do their job well and want to know how to measure success. Their passion may lie elsewhere. If you are a creative, passionate individual it is easy to discount these people as uninspired. But that's not really fair. As Ambrose Little said earlier in this thread: "As for innovation...businesses can't bank on that, and even most who aspire to that will fail....I don't think it's wise to...toss out process--the point of which is to provide some repeatable consistency, even if imperfect and not particularly sexy." While I push back on those who say "UCD is Broken," I also listen to them very carefully. I think that there is merit in their criticism and it does spur me to rethink ideas that I may have held uncritically for some time. What I don't agree with is the idea that you must discard the past to move forward. For me, that's too cheap and easy an approach. In the US, many of our folk heroes are mavericks who, without formal schooling in the status quo, come up with a breakthrough idea that turns everything on its head. Sometimes that model works and produces exciting results. But what we forget is that most innovations come from people who studied the process and were insightful enough to see beyond it. Beethoven studied Bach. Picasso studied El Greco and Gauguin. Like Newton, they "saw father than other because they stood on the shoulders of giants." We need both rich process and breakthrough thinking. And understanding the former is one of the best ways to achieve the latter. Charlie ============================ Charles B. Kreitzberg, Ph.D. CEO, Cognetics Corporation ============================ -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Scott Berkun Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 3:40 PM To: 'IXDA list' Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Is UCD Really Broken? > 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 ________________________________________________________________ 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 ________________________________________________________________ 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
