[Sigia-l] We could just use whiteboards instead.

[Stewart Dean]

At 13:49 19/08/2003 -0400, Listera wrote:
>"Stewart Dean" wrote:
>
> > The technology is not important.
>
>How can you say that when the very thing that you produce at the end of all
>this is 100% digital, technological artifact? Make one 'small' mistake (like
>using the wrong format) and you can even deny basic access to your product,
>forget about all the other niceties. We design/develop *digital*
>collaborative environments, automated workflows, data access routines,
>communication pathways, etc., but we won't use ourselves the technologies we
>spec for our users to use?

WE don't develop the applications implementations - that's for those who 
have the skills to do. We don't design technical systems, we design 
information architectures and user experiences.

What ever we design based upon what the technology can do, not how it does 
it, it can be implemented many different ways. It's a clean separation 
between design and implementation. It's taking a few steps back and looking 
at what the users want to do, not how the current technology currently does 
things.

This, I feel, is something you are choosing not to do when it comes to the 
lo-fi / hi-fi discussion. The users work better with a whiteboard and post 
it notes, you only need to see them in action to determine that. Yet you 
feel that it is vital to use a hi-fi solution because the end solution is 
hi-fi.  Surely we only use the technology because it will do what we want 
to do IF we design the user experience correctly. When we design any 
solutions we have to think about the real world and how people are going to 
use it. The whiteboard situation is endemic of that kind of thinking. A 
technical solution would be more fragile, complex, limiting and require a 
darkened environment to be more effective, all of which hamper the process 
it is there to facilitate.

So let me repeat again - the technology is not important - and add - it 
will do what we want it to do. This is what I mean by having a healthy 
disrespect for technology. If it doesn't do what we want it to do then the 
first job is to find out a way that it can - and that is where good 
engineers support us. The technology is there to support our work, in an 
ideal world.

Now I appreciate that we have to make compromises, we all work with limited 
time and money budgets, but I hope you can at least see the point I'm 
getting at.



>This reminds me of a meeting I once had at the dawn of the WWW with a few
>execs of TimeWarner's Pathfinder.com. They were so uncomfortable with the
>medium and technology that anything *digital* we had to discuss, including
>email, had to be printed out. I knew then and there, despite all the money
>and hoopla, Pathfinder wasn't going anywhere. And it didn't.

People still do print out text to read. If that is what the users want then 
that's what the user gets. The execs my not have been your typical user but 
they did represent the actions that you would find amongst users. Sounds 
like it was case of being able to show them how others used the Internet so 
they could empathise with the potential users. Old media, incidently, can 
teach use many things. Having worked on a paper based publication it's 
taught me a lot about how electronic content should be treated.

Regards

Stewart Dean