[Sigia-l] Distance-based graduate programs in human factors

[Andrew Boyd]

Hi,

I must once again concur with my learned colleague: book larnin' is a 
good thing, but there is no substitute for experience for the 
practitioner. The experience can be enjoyable: on my next-to-last 'inny' 
contract we were starting a formal usability test program - the junior 
engineers assigned to the program had been exposed to the concept of 
usability, but until they sat down and listened to a dozen of their 
projected end users saying "Why can't I find the X button? Where is the 
X button?" it just didn't mean as much. Coincidentally, speaking of 
books, copies of "Don't Make Me Think" and the Polar Bear book became 
very popular amongst the engineers. We sold the engineers and their 
managers on IA slowly, starting as a "usability for navigation" concept, 
and fed their ideas back into the usability test process. This caught on 
and eventually we were doing pure IA work. The engineers loved it - we 
learnt that involving them was a good thing, and that they really did 
care what the end users thought. I can't remember which personal 
development book it was that said "Given a choice, most people will want 
to do the right thing". I think that they went away, at least, with a 
feeling that any testing and user survey was better than none.

I believe strongly that we do need the academic side of IA as well, and 
this has to be balanced by the practitioners in the field getting as 
much directed/focused experience as possible.

Cheers, Andrew

Listera wrote:

> I've trained many designers and developers over the years, and mentored
> people via email. While you can get a lot of 'facts' and impressions 
> of what
> *other* people have done via e-learning, there's no substitute for 
> doing it
> yourself and getting immediate feedback via human interaction.
>
>  
>


-- 
___________________________________________
Andrew Boyd	andrew at friendlymanual.com
http://www.friendlymanual.com
"Do not ask me why I follow my heart,
ask yourself why you do not follow yours."
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