Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Cennydd Bowles

Cennydd Bowles — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 22:40:01 GMT

I agree with a lot of what you say but, to me, this article reads a little bit like one of those “BREAKING NEWS: Wikipedia may not be entirely accurate” stories. If you write a Masters’ dissertation based on a Wikipedia article you’re a fool. If you base any kind of big design decisions solely off log files you’re a fool. But both *can* be a useful guide, a starting off point for future investigation. IAs are pretty adept at gathering data from numerous sources and appreciating the strengths and weaknesses of each observation. I’d content that analytics can contribute to this. To write it off completely, as this article does, seems a little over-zealous.

Cennydd Bowles — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:11:43 GMT

One comment you make is “We want to make sure we have solid data based on facts, not perceptions.” Agreed. In fact, it’s something of a truism perhaps – but I do wonder whether this method is susceptible to this very problem. By talking to the people who talk to users, we introduce another layer of bias (political, cognitive, whatever) and thus could end up a bit further from facts than if we’d gathered them ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong, your approach can be useful in some circumstances, and I’ve used it myself in the past when I’ve had zero (and I do mean zero) budget to do more thorough research. But, given the choice, face-to-face testing / ethnographic research has to be preferable.

As a postscript, I’d say that anyone who argues that “if I like it, everybody will…” is neither a good designer, nor indeed a designer at all.

Cennydd Bowles — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:59:36 GMT

Sounds like a great idea.

Similar to Joannes’ comment, I’d be really interested to hear what games can teach us about flow. Mostly they’re designed precisely to keep people out of flow (swinging blades, dead ends, annoying monsters), whereas a site should keep the user in flow – perhaps by learning about how to impede flow, we can learn how to remove those barriers in our own designs?