Diana Wild — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:03:45 GMT

Great posting. Everyone on the team needs to have an understanding of the business context, i.e., how their actions contribute to or detract from the value of the product. Management likes the sound of UCD because it means that the users will like the outcome. They know that happy users are users who will diligently use the system. There are always three goals for a system 1) to support performance of the business process at hand, 2) to serve the needs of downstream processes with high quality data and 3) to produce high quality data to support broader management decision making, for example, as part of a data warehouse. As an enterprise data modeler, I am responsible for designing data structures that ensure that data that flows to downstream processes and into the data warehouse is of high quality. Where the user design can interfere is with directing developers to create unmanaged data redundancy, ambiguity of terms, optionality of data that is critical to the downstream and sometimes not persisting data that is needed downstream. If we work together, with a willingness to compromise on all sides and in an environment where everyone’s expertise is valued, the result will naturally produce high quality data as well as a high quality user experience.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Diana Wild