A few days ago, while reading a book on a traditional user-centered design (UCD) methodology I caught myself thinking: “This is sooo engineering!.” It was solid UCD, but it felt old fashion. It made me realize how radically my concept of usability has changed in just a few years. It made me also realize that if many people in web and software design have pushed new ideas and evolved, the traditional view of usability and interface design is still very much alive.
A product development process built around the user and the experience is an expensive proposition for many companies. On the surface, companies may reject user- and experience-centric approaches because they appear more expensive (more steps, more people involved, more time); deep inside, taking a user-centric approach is frightening because it requires relinquishing control and embracing a 180° cultural shift.
April 24, 2006
Scott Cook on innovation
Scott Cook opened CHI 2006 with a plenary on fostering innovation. Live-blogging notes have been posted on the CHI Blog. Here are my notes, which are not a word-by-word report on the talk but more of an annotated reconstruction (quote at your own risk).
Creating Game-changing Invention
The brief -Â Innovation happens at the junction between business and customer needs, not from executive ideas or lonely geniuses within the company. Indeed, innovation bottlenecks are often at the top. Creating a culture of innovation is about nurturing customer observation, incubating new ideas, celebrating failure, and staying out of the way. Read Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) and Peter Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship).
Intuit: Changes lives so profoundly people can’t imagine going back to the old way.
Solitary designers, lonely geniuses, and isolated creative teams: it’s time for you to think about social interaction for your user interfaces. No, I am not talking about social software, user-created content, or Web 2.0. I am talking about any old-fashion user interface: because for us human beings any interaction is a social interaction–even when we are interacting with "a stupid machine."
October 7, 2005
Love your test participants more than yourself
Last week, I had a chance to conduct user interviews after quite a while. I loved any minute of it. There is nothing more rewarding (for me) than spending two hours with people I never met before (and probably I will never meet again) trying to understand the world from their point of view.
In those two hours and from the first few seconds, my attention is totally focused on the other person. I observe how they enter the room, how they look at me, and how they shake my hand; I need to understand anything I can about their personality, their level of comfort, and their communication style to be able to be in synch with them. The entire session is a dance, where I ask and listen, probe and observe, with the only purpose of gaining insight in somebody else perceptions, thoughts, and expectations. It’s always a fascinating journey.
September 25, 2005
Perceived cost-benefit and (online) behavior
Often I hear these broad blanket statements on what people do or don’t do online: "people don’t read," "people don’t scroll," "people don’t wait." Usually these declarations come from people who have just enough knowledge of usability to be dangerous, but, alas, I’ve heard even usability practitioners uttering them. When I hear statements like those I usually slowly count to 10 to regain self-control and then I say: "Well, let’s talk about it."
So, let’s talk about it.