[Sigia-l] IA and medium

[Lyle_Kantrovich at cargill.com]

Ziya Oz said: 
> If you're a gazillion dollar company *and* you are in the business 
> of doling out lofty advice on this very subject matter *and* it's 
> one of the handful menu items visible *and* you can't come up with 
> something better, maybe it's time for something else.
> 
> If you don't expect better, that's your problem.

So effectively you're saying "if you're big and cash-rich, and you 
promote a concept, you'd better implement everything relative to that 
concept perfectly or don't bother"?

Oh please.  Ziya, please come down from your "lofty" pedestal and point 
us to YOUR web site where you further the field of IA or User 
Experience or whatever.  At CHI I made a point to personally commend 
IBM for being one of the few big companies helping to evangelize around 
UCD.  They've provided the industry a number of tools for free as well 
as good documentation.  Not to mention they are raising the awareness 
of the need for IA and UCD.  If you want to toss out the baby with the 
bathwater, then that's YOUR problem.  

Would I ever use the phrase "User Engineering"?  No.

Constructive criticism is good.  Blasting a group doing (and sharing) a 
lot of good work based on some little nit you can pick is just ignorant 
-- especially when you aren't doing it better yourself.  You seem to 
have lots of lofty criticism, but little useful advice.

I notice you didn't supply a better label.  You might want to first 
understand what concept they are trying to label: 
http://www-3.ibm.com/ibm/easy/eou_ext.nsf/Publish/2558  "User 
Engineering addresses the total user experience, incorporating many 
well established practices such as User Centered Design,.  It requires 
a multidisciplinary design team to create this experience in 
partnership with its intended users."  It encompasses everything from 
awareness to packaging to post-sales.  It's NOT UIE, it's broader than 
UCD -- you might call it UXD, but it's bigger than "design".  Maybe 
they should have just kept this valuable insight into their 
processes/thinking to themselves until they got the right label...

Ziya, rather than instigating little flame wars on SIGIA, maybe you 
should try something more constructive.  You have some good points and 
posts at times, but if I had to pick between your posts and 
www.ibm.com/easy, I can say it'd be an easy choice.  My customers 
actually will listen to IBM.  IBM, in promoting their "Make IT easy" 
concepts, helps me sell my services.

I can honestly say from talking to a lot of people from IBM and people 
I know using their products that IBM is using UCD in their organization 
and it's making their products better.  Are they perfect?  No, but show 
me a UCD or IA Nirvana...I've yet to see one.

A few notable IBM'ers who've shared work recently:
Keith Instone (and others) http://keith.instone.org/hci-ia-chi2002/
http://keith.instone.org/breadcrumbs/

Karel Vredenberg 
http://www.carleton.ca/hotlab/hottopics/Articles/KarelVredenberg.html

They also target I/T developers with the usability message:
http://www-105.ibm.com/developerworks/papers.nsf/dw/usability-papers-bynewest?OpenDocument&Count=500

I'm 
still waiting for a Ziya site to bookmark...  ;)

Regards,

Lyle Kantrovich

Croc O' Lyle: a personal web log on usability, IA, and web design
http://crocolyle.blogspot.com