[Sigia-l] "Designing in Hostile Territory"

[Stewart Dean]

On 24/11/05 8:30 am, "Listera" <listera at rcn.com> wrote:

> Andrew Boyd:
> 
>> a way to convince senior management
> 
> I'm not sure if this will be legal down under but what I often do is to
> refuse to talk with some of my clients about design at the start of a
> project (for what probably seems like a very long time). I focus entirely on
> business strategy and liberally deemphasize the mechanics of design. (I even
> have number of slides in my presentations that make fun of designers and
> provide examples of their ineptitude.) So they get acclimated to the notion
> of "business strategy by design" without their anti-design genes getting
> tickled. Some come to think of design as medicine, perhaps opaque and bitter
> (to them), but necessary and curative.

It strikes me that the language is a bit dated here.

Do you mean design or do you mean user experience. The argument I often make
is the user experience often is the business model.

Design is an emotive term that to many means 'visual design'. Equally
'usability' is also an emotive term as it means, to many, fixing a user
interface to make it better.

I find the best way to avoid old problems is to introduce clients to the
idea of user experience and avoiding design altogether. Leverage can be
bought by incorporating traditional business areas such as CRM and using
successful online business model examples such as eBay, Amazon etc.

Cheers

Stewart Dean