Well I agree to a certain extent if it wasn't exactly that this is the problem of UCD. It does not really go outside it's own premises to integrate as a part of a process, but "claim" to be the verification point of the process.
I was taught a very simple thing when I studied design. Design is a decision. In other words you need to make good decisions in order to create good design. What constitutes a good decisions is a different story all together and UCD does not really look at that. Instead it caters although maybe unintentionally to a wisdom of the crowds aesthetic WITHOUT including the knowledge already accumulated by many years of knowledge from the designers. The crowds is not wrong because they are the users of your product, design, platform, interface whatever you wanna call it so you end up with UCD being percieved as the most objective way to validate your product. UCD would make sense to a certain extent if it was applied correctly I agree, but it never is and never will be because of the nature of how projects that utilizes on it are done today. Also many of the people who uses UCD have an academic background and have never actually done any nity gritty design themselves which add further to the problem of the whole area. Academic people will most often have a much more strategically important position than the designers and will therefore be the people translating and verifying the actual design through these processes up against the clients. UCD basically most often makes no sense other than from an economic and political point of view (the agency doing it can make money since they are selling it as yet another component and the client will have secured themselves from any punishment from upper management by being able to claim that it was based around UCD) UCD should IMHO if anything be something you use AFTER the launch to alter your product based on the input. This is where the input is valuable and the feedback can be used to make decisions. But at the current state it ads no value but basically simply just is a proof that many companies don't really dare making decisions and dare I say fail. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=31098 ________________________________________________________________ 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
