Anita Salem — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 03:21:44 GMT

James, thanks for bringing up the more strategic aspects of the work we do. I do think that many IA/usability/UCD people can be overly focused on the tactical “problem solving” aspect of our work. Good architects should always be looking for underlying business and user needs to provide value. Like Ray said, though, we are really not doing structurally anything different than has been traditionally done in product development. What I think we do very differently is apply design practices (prototyping, iterations for example)to business problems. We also uncover issues through a bottom up approach (interviewing, field studies, etc.). The iterative, empirical, user centered processes we use are what differentiate us from the other traditional processes.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Anita Salem