

Why everything you think about User Centred Design is wrong - ThomPete
http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you-think-about-user-centred-design-is-wrong/

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mrshoe
Some of the points in this article are correct (e.g. UCD isn't applicable to
every single design decision), but the main thesis depends on a couple of
false assumptions.

He asks, " _Which of the following ways would you think gave you the most
valuable feedback?_ " He submits that almost everyone would agree the real
hammer will provide more valuable feedback than the paper or foam ones. This
part is true. The next statement is false. He states that UCD practitioners
would have chosen differently had the product been a web site instead of a
hammer. They would have chosen the paper prototype, he says. That's just not
true. UCD advocates the use of paper prototypes, not because they provide more
valuable feedback, but because they are much easier to build. This means that
you can test more of them in a shorter period of time. That's a _very_
important distinction.

His graph of the UCD process essentially depicts it as a waterfall process,
where there are several design steps with big Implement and Deploy steps at
the end. That's also usually far from the truth. UCD is very iterative and, if
done correctly, involves launching early and using data from real-world usage
at each iteration.

It's easy to criticize something if you fabricate its weaknesses. The title of
this post is pretty ironic.

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youngian
I expected a thought-provoking read, but instead I get the impression that the
author doesn't really understand prototyping, or the design process in
general. Maybe the end has some brilliant revelation that makes it all
worthwhile - I wouldn't know because I stopped reading about a third of the
way through.

A couple specific gripes:

* That hammer analogy is just awful. A paper representation of a hammer loses all functionality of a hammer. A paper representation of a website loses very little. Also, which would be worse - to draw a hammer for someone and have them say "why does the claw not have a space in the middle for a nail?" or to have them say that after you've spent a month creating your prototype?

* "According to studies by J.Nielsen, users don’t scroll... None-the-less, users scroll more than ever..." ...and so clearly Nielsen doesn't know anything. Except he has long since stated that his original scrolling findings are not nearly as true any more. Times changed and users started scrolling. Anyone repeating that trope is just out of date. Anyone like, say, this post.

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shalmanese
The author presents a strawman version of UCD and then tears it down but there
is one important point in the article: UCD really hasn't fully come to grips
with the new era of web applications.

Everything taught in schools about UCD leads up to the final prototyping stage
but there's very little discussion about how UCD applies after a product is
launched. A large part of this has to do with much of UCD research and
literature being driven by academia.

There's a whole host of amazing UCD stuff you can do with a live web app: A/B
testing, polling, behavior tracking, logging etc. However, academics typically
don't have access to applications being used by real users & companies are
focused more on being effective than documenting their practices so there's a
disconnect.

Some of the most interesting research coming out of UCD right now comes from
PhD students in HCI doing summer internships at places like facebook, Google &
Yahoo. They have access to interesting sources of data yet are concerned more
for scientific validity than effectiveness so they're asking different
questions about it.

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ThomPete
Where is the strawman? The wikipedia version? Or the way I say it's applied?

The very thing that you point out as being relevant is my point exactly. That
UCD should test on customers not users in a real environment.

I am not against any of the mentioned A/B testing, polling, behavior tracking,
logging etc. those are the very things I would wish more would do.

The problem is that I am of course stepping on a lot of peoples toes that do
exactly what I am after. And there are more than you would think. That is
least what my 14 years of working with hundreds of clients have shown me.

~~~
potatolicious
I found the initial example to be invalid, especially having worked in
"physical" industries (auto parts manufacturing, to be precise). The four
choices are presented as if they are mutually exclusive - they are not - and
are in fact quite often _used together_.

Options 1 through 3 are incredibly useful for early prototyping in order to
whittle down a large set of potential solutions. Certainly every design
process I've ever been a part of has also gone through option 4. To present
these choices as if people are blindly walking down paths 1-3 and only them,
is IMHO the straw man.

tl;dr version: The article brings up the classic "look what dumb people are
doing!" example, but yet I don't see people doing these dumb things that are
supposedly being done.

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ThomPete
So let me see if I understand.

You are taking in users and have them look at drawings of your products?

I am not saying you shouldn't do 1-3 I am saying you shouldn't test 1-3 on
users. You should test 4

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pbhjpbhj
So basically you think hammer manufacturers should do all the design and
testing in the dark, then finalise drawings, design and produce production
processes and machinery and tool up a factory, forge hammers ... and then show
them to the buyer for the first time.

Buyer: "we wanted ball-pein hammers not claw hammers perhaps you could show us
a product drawing next time"

~~~
ThomPete
You are confusing what kind of product the customers want with testing a
product you have decided to try and make.

In so far as producing the first hammer yes they should do it in dark. That
have nothing to do with whether they should research if there is even market
for it. But it is not done by asking the users to look at a paper prototype of
the hammer.

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foulmouthboy
While I agree with lots of what's being said in this, the initial analogy
really leaves something to be desired. Obviously, the concept for the very
first hammer went through a design process as what's been charted out in the
blog. Man needs to pound one thing into another to hold it in place. Man tries
rock. Man asks around to see what might work better. Etc. The process just
didn't linger at the initial steps as long as the final step because the
physical application of the tool is such an important thing to demonstrate.

In digital, where much of the initial design surrounds process and more
abstract concepts, we can hang out around the early steps longer and to
greater effect.

