

My Two Years as an Anthropologist on the Photoshop Team - ingve
https://medium.com/@Mediauras/my-two-years-as-an-anthropologist-on-the-photoshop-team-e700acb7d3d5

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paulojreis
This is great and represents, IMHO, the key to building a great UX. I also
believe ethnographic methods are the best weapon in a UX expert arsenal.
There's little value in evaluating a UI built on wrong assumptions.

I hope this "grows", in Adobe and in other companies. Enough of design being
about the latest fad, or deciding what the user "wants"/"needs" based on
hunches, or - at the root - building products based on assumptions about
"people" without systematically studying them. We have the methodology to
really understand users and to leave engineer-driven digital products behind.
This is really what design is about; form follows function, and we've been
deciding what the "function" is all wrong.

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unoti
There's some kind of JavaScript mess going on that prevents me from being able
to read this article on my iPad. I can read it for a couple seconds until the
page loads, then everything but the header and footer disappear.

Amusingly, I gather from the comments here that the article is about UX.

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MichaelCrawford
A UC Santa Cruz student wrote her dissertation on the culture of elementary
particle physicists by infiltrating the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

She reported that the scientists at SLAC "wear t-shirts and blue jeans".

I don't recall or name or the title but someone at
[http://anthro.ucsc.edu/](http://anthro.ucsc.edu/) should be able to tell you;
if you actually want to read it you should be able to get it through
interlibrary loan at your local library.

Rather more seriously, in UCSC's Anthropology of Religion I read a book by an
anthropologist who read a UFO cult leader's proud announcement of the specific
date upon which aliens would visit the earth to bring peace - save us from
nuclear war, etc.

Knowing that a vital peer-reviewed publication was at hand, the anthropologist
joined the cult.

I don't recall that book's title or author either but I will post it in an
edit or reply if I can dig it up.

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felixc
Another similar example is Tracy Kidder (a writer, not an anthropologist)
being embedded with a team at Data General, resulting in the fantastic book
"The Soul of a New Machine". I can't recommend it enough.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine)

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ghaff
Still probably the best book on product development ever written. [Disclaimer:
I worked at DG for 13 years, albeit a bit later, and knew many of the people
in "the book" quite well including Tom West.]

Showstopper, on the development of Windows NT, is also quite good.

