[Sigia-l] Are your intensions good/

[Ziya Oz]

Dan Saffer:

> Otherwise, more often  than not, the designer simply extends the values of the
> company  itself, whether or not he/she personally agrees with them.

If we can stipulate that without clients there'd be no professional
designers, isn't the job of the designer, precisely, to extend the values of
the company that pays him?

> At  Adaptive Path, we've occasionally turned away work simply because
> employees have objected to a possible client on ethical grounds.

That, of course, is the way to go.
 
> The fundamental ethical baseline for interaction designers should be
> the quality of the interactions engendered by the design between
> people, both from the person initiating the interaction (the email
> sender, say) and the person receiving it.

Example: this afternoon, a beautiful sunny day in NYC where I could be in
the park I'm overlooking enjoying myself, I had to wait for a maintenance
guy to come and fix a broken window slider. Lady called from the office
apologizing that the guy would be 10 mins late. That's good.

Guy came and fixed the problem. That's also good. Then I said, you know
what, another window in the living room is making a similar noise so could
you take a look at it and change the same widget *before* the same happens
to it. He went on a long excuse laden explanation of how one job order can't
be used to repair two things, especially one that hasn't happened yet...

I asked him if he agreed that the second window would suffer the same fate
soon. He agreed. Yet he huffed and puffed and went back and forth, but
finally fixed it. He asked me to email the office, etc.

Yes, the email interaction part was designed OK but the process whereby I
saved myself *and* the maintenance office time and aggravation by avoiding a
second most likely visit was not.

As (current) designers we don't get to "design" the whole experience. As in,
as long as you don't give field people the most rudimentary ability to make
appropriate just-in-time decisions, your help desk, contact us,
troubleshooting, etc section will get a workout, no matter how well
"designed" they may be because the whole process is broken.

This, in a week even the divide-and-conquer Microsoft has come to the
conclusion (as I previously mentioned here) that it must design the whole
experience (gadget/software/service/etc) to compete with the
iTunes/iTMS/iPod phenomenon. Sort of like what Joel is talking about here:

<http://uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000105.php>

So, in a nutshell, yes the clients choose us as employees and designers,
but, in the end, we get to reflect their values so we must choose them as
well. Carrying two agendas often lead to disaster and, in many aspects, is
unethical.
 
> We should always ask, are the designs we make (or could make) good--
> i.e. good for the users, those directly or indirectly affected, the
> culture, the environment?

Well, who gets to decide what's "good" design? Client? You? Users? Users
don't pay us, clients do. Do we subvert the client?

----
Ziya

Usability >  Simplify the Solution
Design >  Simplify the Problem