[Sigia-l] Brazilian Usability and IA (was Ethnographic resear ch?)

[Mauro Pinheiro]

> Alexandre Castro e Silva wrote:
>: The Brazilian Usability and Information Architecture scene is minimal
>: and confess I feel lonely. I have a blog on Usability but since
>: there's almostno one on Brazil to read it, I'll be posting in English 
>: from now on, and I'll also be gradually translating the old posts. 
>: Show up, I could use some company.
>
>
>Close to five years ago I felt the same way as you did. As an information
>architect in São Paulo, it seemed as though the only possibilities for
>career growth were abroad. Then I remember how large our country is and how
>it didn't make sense that the opportunities were so scarce.

Livia, is important to notice that although we do live in a large country,
the main concentration of web development still relies on two states, Rio
and São Paulo - some very interesting stuff going on in Recife, but mostly
in academic area or in software development, and they still have not noticed
the need for HCI studies in software development cycle.


>I am glad to inform that I have found a great deal of work being done in
the
>universities (though still more prominently on software usability).

I was in the 2003 CLIHC in Rio also, and I was worried with the high number
of works that concentrate in technical aspects of what they called
"usability", putting aside important topics about the human centered design
and communication issues. I realized then that people from computer science
areas are much more in the business of HCI in Brasil than information
architects and designers.


>What we lack is communication. We have people scattered around the country
>doing a bunch of interesting stuff and nowhere we can share all this
>production. As you would expect (and as is national tradition), university
>research is almost entirely disconnect with the market. Universities are
>very protective of their production and we don't have a culture of sharing
>knowledge. Though there is outstanding work being done, it's more of an ego
>trip for the researchers than actual contribution to the industry. But this
>is cultural and requires time to change.

That's mostly true. I work here at GLobo.com for almost 4 years, leading a
team of both designers and information architectures, whose work is focused
on user experience. We have built the first in-house usability lab in our
country in 2000, when there wasn't scare HCI work been done in the market.

We had several contacts with academic people, without been able to establish
ANY kind of partnership. There was a problem of timing; while in industry
(specially in Brasil) there is a rush for developing things at "internet
speed" (argh!), in Universities they work in a totally different rhythm,
that make it impossible to do a partnership. You might say that we should
think in more long term projects, but there is no way I could make this
happen in such a time-to-market driven place like Globo.com.

Research is something the market should do. But specially in Internet
business, is believed that is better to make it fast than make it right.
This is something we fight against for a long time, and sometimes we have
become successful, with high levels of stress in the way. But we have a very
good team, and I am proudly to have worked with some of the best people in
the business. About 15 different colleagues have passed through this place,
and certainly they contributed a lot to HCI field in Brasil. But still we
have a lack for in-deep research, we mostly have learned things empirically,
while trying new solutions during the projects. A partnership with
University could help a lot, but we weren't able to overcome this timing
problem.


>Slowly the HCI crowd seems to be moving on to the Internet as well. The
fact
>that our national Internet industry grew from the expansion of the big Ad
>agencies is one of the reasons why (I blame them for) such a disconnect
(due
>to their lack of interest in producing long-lasting solutions).

Thanks God. But there are much people trying to bite a piece of the cake,
while is still hot...seems to me that there are many talking about things
they don't really know, as HCI is becoming more known and market is looking
for people who knows how to improve their products. But although there is
still just a few who can really do a good job, seems to me that many are
posing as HCI experts without knowledge or experience in the are.

Hope I'm wrong! :-)


mauro pinheiro
--------------------
Globo.com : Criação
+ 55 (21) 2483.6597
http://www.globo.com