[Sigia-l] card sorting: dealing with multiple placements

[Jonathan Broad]

Listera wrote:

>>The only measure of success I accept for research methods is: do they deliver
>>good user experience within budget.
>>    
>>
>
>While not wishing to get in the middle of the current love-fest regarding
>LIS, I'd love to know what 'within budget' means.
>
>Is there a way you could get, for instance, $500 worth of 'good user
>experience'? How about $349.99?
>

Sounds like you're buying one of those package deals I keep getting 
email about.  What a bargain!

In fact, a user's experience is up to them.  But you can spend more or 
less money building something for them to experience.  Whether you or 
your users get your money's worth is a much more complicated question.

>Needless to say, I do recognize that there are budgets and that good user
>experience is better than bad user experience, but I had never heard of
>indexing the success rate of 'research' to budgets.
>

Sorry, I was being a bit rhetorical.  Didn't mean to index anything to 
anything else!

In context, I meant to say that to be successful, methods should also 
fit the time and resource constraints of the design problem--that's 
all.  Of course that's only a necessary and not sufficient condition of 
success: they also have to lead to a good design that satisfies users.  
So that's two measures--but 'index' would imply a quantification that 
begs all sorts of questions about the ROI of user experience that I'm 
not willing to get into right now.  Being in one 'love-fest' is 
sufficient for right now!

What's also implied here is that there are a wide variety of methods 
with different strengths and weaknesses and costs.  Counting on a small 
set of methods to solve all your design problems isn't being realistic, 
and not only from a resource-constraint POV.


Jonathan