Article Idea:
Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design
suggested by Joseph Selbie on 2007/09/07
While our profession increasingly gains recognition, our profession has at the same time increasingly specialized: UX, IX, ethnographic research, usability testing—the list goes on and on.
But in our recent best practice study we found that it was the core team members that achieved a “holistic” understanding of the project that designed the most successful web applications.
Specialization is fine as long as it helps form a holistic view—but it can succeed in fragmenting the design process to such an extent that it becomes counter productive.
Our study covered in house teams designing web applications across multiple industries, big companies and small. The best practices we identified were corroborated with user satisfaction interviews.
I’d like to offer suggestions for how teams can foster a holistic view by implementing the best practices we observed.
Want to see this idea turned into a story?
9 people said yes. | 0 people said no.
Alexander Muir
10 Reputation points
Posted 2007/09/11 @ 12:18PM with
Hearing best practices based on research would be very interesting. Holistic is one of these words that’s a bit vague, but does correspond to a definite type of experience or outlook. Its hard for me to put my finger on it, so reading this would be a help!
Michael Coombs
0 Reputation points
Posted 2007/09/11 @ 13:44PM with
I would enjoy this article. I work as a User Centered Design principal in a large enterprise software company that uses Agile methods. I find myself often working with teams where various players (Project Managers, Engineers, Product Owners, Marketing, etc.) are making core decisions and yet do not have a “feel” for the whole interface, or even a solid perception of their application user segments and their needs.
Richard Dalton
15 Reputation points
Posted 2007/09/11 @ 20:15PM with
I’ll echo Michael’s comments – i’m in the same situation and would really enjoy seeing this written.
Ben Tremblay
0 Reputation points
Posted 2007/11/07 @ 20:24PM with
I would like to see, and anticipate that you would include, a treatment of how failure to realize the design at the detail level triggers a very pragmatic reaction at the level of “holistic vision”, where a more dumbed-down ambition is likely to ignore the small stuff and end up tangled in a rat’s nest.