[Sigia-l] "Getting the design right, and getting the right design"

[Andrew Boyd]

On 6/16/07, Ziya Oz <listera at earthlink.net> wrote:

> For years, my contention has been that *strategic* aspects of design (that
> starts long before any #2B touches paper) trumps every other aspect
> thereafter. Usability profession, as presently constituted, has little to
> contribute in that regard: they focus on symptoms not the root cause.

Hi Ziya,

I think that just as there is big IA and little IA - an arbitrary
divider somewhere on the continuum that is the strategic and the
tactical - so there is big usability and little usability. Its a set
of tools that can be used either way.

I'm thinking back over the last week, where I got to play with:
- day to day tactical stuff: the use of email vs screen messages as a
notification mechanism, and the mechanics of annotation capture during
meetings
and
- scary strategic stuff: how to rework some processes such that some
of the meetings didn't take place at all.

For my sins, I consider my approach to both the tactical and the
strategic to be coloured by usability, well, at least some UCD101
things (that I hesitate to call best practices) such as "let's assume
that the business clients are busy people and so we won't
inconvenience them any more than we need to by designing awkward
processes" and "don't let a user-system interaction go un-confirmed",
not to mention "let's design a system that meets human needs rather
than reverse-engineer the current database again", and my favourite,
"let's try and give them what they need in a form that they can
understand" :)

Cheers, Andrew
---
Andrew Boyd
http://facibusreviews.com