Donna Maurer on User Centered Design
Jakob Nielsen should be removed from the galaxy — “There is no correlation between having a UCD team and producing good stuff. Some UCD teams produce garbage; some companies manage very well without.”
What do you think?
January 4th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
I have to agree with the part that says ‘design’ is what we should be doing, and not ‘usability’. We need to sell the idea that design isn’t about making something look nice, but about making it work well (LukeW’s site has a nice list of quotes about design). Well designed products are usable because the item’s use was taken into consideration during the design.
As for not being the center of the universe, I recently joined the UPA and the poster they send out (a board-game metaphor for UCD makes many of the developers I share space with laugh. Actual development of a system doesn’t happen until near the end of the game. While I strive to be on the software development team from the very beginning and push design first, then code, there are plenty of things developers can be doing (database structure, connections and formatting of other data sources) at the same time as the design.