These days I’m doing a usability test on wemind.dk. What I find most interesting so far is that the participants seem to regard design mistakes as “intended messages: http://www.wemind.dk/om-wemind/profiler. It’s easy to see the mistake here (two of the profile pictures are out of line). The participants in the test sees that as if those two pictures are supposed to tell us that Anne and Hans Henrik hold a different position than the rest of the people depicted. Interesting because it points to a high degree of trust users have in products’ perfection. What happens to a user’s perception if that trust is broken?
Archive for the ‘ux’ Category
in the last 30 years, there has not been one website or other digital innovation that can point back to UCD as the defining factor for its success.
How ever as Jakob Buur noticed at a recent presentation on design anthropology; not listening to, involving or understanding the user has never proved to be the single point of success either.
It’s a good thing that design research and the technology business in general are directing attention to the development world or emergent markets (btw a noun that may express why attention is being paid to the seond and third world at this point in history). I’m glad because the digital divide between western and non-western countries seems to decrease. It’s not only a positive thing (in most cases) for the actual countries and cultures in question, but it’s also a good thing for the world of tech. People now gain the possibility of not exaggerating too much when easily including the whole world in technological progress…
May I just humbly suggest that you don’t exotizise the unfamiliar to the extend expressed in this otherwise brilliant interview: .
Today we face the mass extinction of plant and animal species. But we also face the mass extinction of languages and modes of thought and perception. Just as disappearing plant species may hold the keys to preventing or curing physical diseases, the modes of being and thinking of so-called primitive peoples may hold crucial keys to solving some of humanities recurrent problems such as prejudice and warfare and emergent ones such as global pollution.
I really believe that instead of gaining new insights you may risk repeating the failures of the development business, if you don’t try to understand the actual life worlds and premises of the people you study preferably to going along with what you think people are like.
Lately I’ve been following the user vs expert-discussion prompted this time by an article in Wired Magazine featuring the guys from 37signals. It’s an old discussion, but as users get more and more involved on different levels of design processes the question of who you are designing for pops up more frequently. Hence the Norman vs 37signals-dispute isn’t the only thing out there touching upon the subject. Here too user involvement is questioned.
To me the discussion is exciting, but disturbing too. I must admit that initially I felt that my area of expertise was under heavy attack. But then again I guess that the etnographic method and it’s user/human focus has been under attack for more than hundred years now, so just because the world of tech has discovered the user fairly recently, and might abandon listening to them already doesn’t mean that I’m becoming obsolete. Still the dicussion is disturbing though.
As I strove my way through the first sixtysomething comments on 37signals’ answer to Norman I wondered why everybody assumed that one side of the table was wrong and the other right. I saw nobody questioning the premises of the whole disucssion. Why ask if the user is right, and on the other side why ask if the expert is? Who is right should nok count for anything in development!
Why?
1) The user: It’s not about the user being right or wrong nor is designing for the user about succumbing to the user’s needs and wishes. It’s all about the user EXPERIENCE and how that experience is interpreted and analyzed. From my point of view you’re doing a pretty bad user experience job if you act as nothing else than a spokes person for the user’s needs.
2) The expert: “Call it arrogance or idealism, but they would rather fail than adapt. ‘I’m not designing software for other people, ‘Hansson says. ‘I’m designing it for me.’ ” (quote from above mentioned article). To that I have to ask: which designer live on a far away deserted planet, isolated from other people or in a vacuum without the possibility of interaction, conversations with, and inspiration from fellow human beings? No products arise in a vacuum. We are all engaged in and influenced by our surroudings including other people, let’s call them users, and products are a result of that. In addition, the designer may be an expert, but she’s most likely a user too…
Thus the discussion is in vain from my point of view. It’s not about who is right or wrong, but all about experience.