Monday, May 29, 2006

The politics of UCD Just before CHI, Richard Anderson wrote: Organizational obstacles. Next week, a paper will be presented at CHI 2006 entitled, "When Design is Not the Problem -- Better Usability Through Non-Design Means." In this paper, Luke Kowalski and his two co-authors state: "When it comes to shipping quality software, design is not the hard part. Methods and techniques to study users, best practices for creating iterative designs, and tools to validate them are all very well documented. Unfortunately, in chaotic and complex ecosystems very few of the designs actually end up making it through the UCD process. Interaction designersâo[dot accent] input is either ignored or interpreted through a development/business lens and considerable fidelity is lost." Richard then provides a long list of reasons why developers and product managers reject UCD recommendations, a list worth keeping handy and perusing each time we begin a design project. The current challenge appears to be demonstrating to the entire team that there's value in design that should not be ignored. Richard goes on to say: Don Norman appeared on the BayCHI program a couple of times before he appeared on the BayCHI panel I mentioned above. The title of his talk during his first BayCHI appearance way back in February 1993 was, "Where HCI Design Fails: The Hard Problems are Social and Political, not Technical." During an on-stage interview just a year and a half ago, I asked Don whether the assertion he made in that title was still true. He answered without hesitation: "yes." [Riander Blog] My limited observations affirm Don's assertion. 9:59:19 AM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

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