On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 12:00 AM, Andrei Herasimchuk < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> If I sat down with a few business executives and showed them two versions > of their product, as well as showed them substantial proof that one of the > products, which had been tested over a three to six month period, returned > significantly higher customer satisfaction, fewer rates of return, higher > sales throughput, but that the product was designed by a 21 year old in > college who did it in his dorm room and knew nothing about UCD, and the > other product was designed by their in-house design team following company > approved UCD methodology, those executives wouldn't say, "We'll use the > product designed by our in-house folks since they obviously followed the > correct procedure." > > Those business executives would take the better product designed by the 21 > year old who did it solo without using any methodology at all... then they'd > promptly fire their entire design team. > > If that's a broad generalization, then consider me guilty as charged. > Hi Andrei, I appreciate the reasoned response. I see a few problems here: 1) This assumes someone has invested up front to build the two versions for the executives to pick from. That might happen in a design competition, but not under any normal business circumstances that I've come across. 2) Executives often either defer decisions on how to build stuff to lower level folks, and those folks, knowing their accountability to their execs, are going to care about reliability, predictability, and accountability from the folks they bring on to make the thing they're responsible for. This isn't true across the board, of course, but it is true enough to account for it in any general discussions about how to go about making good things. IOW, it may be true that certain level execs don't care who things get done as long as they get done, but often the folks that the actual makers (designers, devs, whatever) have to interface with, sell to--please--do care. How about a little empathy for these middle managers? You're asking for a ton of trust to just say give me a budget and you'll get something great at the end--don't worry about what happens in between. I think we'd all like that, but I can see how such a proposal would cause a lot of discomfort for them, especially since they regularly have to report on progress, which implies some knowledge of a plan/process through which the team is progressing and some sense that the plan/process is not ad hoc, i.e., that it has been used successfully before. Anyways, I feel like we're on a tangent, arguing about something we needn't. The question is not whether or not UCD is the only way to make great things; I've yet to see anyone (in this discussion) claim that. The question--the one I posed anyways--was whether or not UCD is broken. I find in this discussion that the value of UCD has been confirmed, along with the acknowledgement that there are indeed other ways to make great products. I hear the concerns about the cost; I can hypothetically understand the value of higher design education, and we all see cases where products have been very successful without UCD. However, I don't really see those feeding into a conclusion that UCD is broken or should be abandoned; instead, I see that you just have to make an informed decision on whether and how to apply it to your particular product/project. --Ambrose ________________________________________________________________ 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
