Ron Zeno — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:49 GMT

Missed the one key type of resource most important to the discussion:
Skills: IA’s dont have a common set of skills, so what skills you do have will be limited and may not even be applicable or effective to the job at hand. Assuming you have the skills doesn’t make it so.

David Heller — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:49 GMT

I think this article both hits on a key element of our future, and misses a huge opportunity for engaging the community in a broader discussion about our methods and the nature of design in our world.

The start of the article had me very excited. What would we be like if we treated ourselves as if we worked for IKEA? What would digital interaction design or digital product design do if we started from the price tag and BTW the price tag is the most fascinating part of a user requirement we say we look so closely at. I have never seen in a persona something listing the price tolerance level of a user or the overall tolerance level of a user (BTW, IKEA needs to look a bit beyond price when it thinks about price tag).

I was inspired in this article to think about using “fuse factories to make candle holders” as a metaphor for us to be thinking about ways to take existing universes that produce stuff we can cannibalize and move forward.

What is important to me most in this discussion is the exposition of the practical in our joint disciplines that make up user experience or user centered design. Our community has very few examples where in the real world idealized methodologies are practices in whole or even in part. Most of us are working in organizations that barely allow for a hodgepodge of methods as Laura discusses here. What would be a great next step for this discussion would be the beginnings of a formalized approach towards real-world “agile” approaches towards design and architecture.

One last thing that I think we seem not to talk a lot about in this community and that is our talent and experience. The right team that brings talent and experience with them is really the first and most important criteria to design success. We need to have this because in the end even with Laura’s great examples of “discount” approaches to UCD methods, we rely more and more in this economy on our talents to create, conceive, meld, assimilate, translate, acculturate, acknowledge and mimic. We are in the end practical magicians working on a thin wire (our constraints) doing wonders.

I think we should take a lesson from my medical anthropology class when exploring the differences between western medicine and traditional healing practices. Both in the end seem to have equal odds of working. So even w/ all the “scientific method” in the world we really have only advanced in our level of confidence, but not really in our level of results. The lesson here to me is that the combination of technology (science) and design (art) leaves us in a position where as artists we love to create, but as scientists we require validation and affirmation about our designs. Maybe we just need to accept that we are good at what we do and just do it!

This all being said, that isn’t to say there isn’t a ton to learn, but the learning needs to be less about methods and more about comparative results. I think that there is more to be gained in result analysis than in methods that study users.

(I’m not throwing it all away, I’m trying to get us to focus a bit in a different direction.)

—dave

Brendan Hamley — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:49 GMT

Can’t remember who said it, but I think it applies here; “perfection is the enemy of good”

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