True - you didn't - Sorry for criticizing you for something you did not say :) My bias is against teams pretending to quantify the unquantifiable. I like opinions. I like things that designers believe but can not prove mathematically, but can explain through argument. Any decision making process that doesn't make use of conviction, persuasion and passion is one I doubt will work out well. Decision models/methods are great provided they're fodder - that they're used to help the discussion and debate, but not to replace it. Too often managers becomes slaves to methods, and they follow them to the letter because of the temptation to dodge their responsibility to think and be accountable: they can blame the method. Or in the case of pure democratic method, blame the team (You voted for it!). Methods can can easily encourage the tolerance for design-by-committee type decisions. So in the case of "how many alternatives", I'm a huge advocate of delegating the design decisions to the point where a small group of people (possibly one), can easily figure this out for themselves - based on the resources they have, divided by the short ordered list of which design decisions are most important. If no such list exists, they should be motivated to make one. If power is distributed well, you're less likely to need a "method". -Scott Scott Berkun www.scottberkun.com
_____ From: Chauncey Wilson [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, January 19, 2009 11:44 AM To: Scott Berkun Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] How many alternatives, concepts, or sketches are enough? You make a good point though I didn't specifically mention equal voting at all. You could have a small group who, as you say, have their necks on the line or you could have private voting of the 10 top designers in the country using polling software or you could generate criteria and have your small group use the criteria as a starting point for a deeper discussion of the type you suggest. You mention listing the criteria on the board which is a great starting point, because many groups fail to explicitly identify criteria that they are using (that method sounds like the QOC method - Questions-Options-Criteria - that is described in the "design rationale" literature.) \ ________________________________________________________________ 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
