[Sigia-l] Human-Centered Design 99% bad

[Listera]

Anne Miller:

> Excel (I don¹t believe I'm using this as an example) has been put to a range
> of non-spreadsheet uses that were never anticipated.

Certainly, but those "uses" were *not* designed; they happened.
 
> Have you ever watched a child with a toy box? What's the child doing with
> the toys if not exploring their possibilities for use/play/or just plain
> exploration? 

But toys are generally *designed* for this: playful exploration. I have also
seen electronic toys so obtusely designed that a kid could only bite it or
throw it across the room in frustration.
 
> How many purposes does a telephone directory serve?

No reason for me to speculate. But I know the *one* reason it was *designed*
to do, without which it would not be a "telephone directory." The
possibility that some day, some one, some place might use it as a Scrabble
aid is not something I need to worry about as the designer.

> I use one to jack up the height of my PC monitor. This is a function of
> characteristics of the technology (phone book), my desktop environment
> (desk/chair/monitor heights) and my need for a higher monitor (my physical
> capacities) and my ability to 'see' the phone book as a solution to my
> problem. 

Again, these may be interesting use cases that are relevant to an
anthropologist, as it were. But there's absolutely no reason for paid
designers to go out of their way to consider your usage of a phone book as a
monitor stand. The fact that you did doesn't inform the design process in a
meaningful way.
 
> When I hit the back button on the browser I just lost all of the information
> on the online form I was filling in and have to do it again).

A designer with half a brain would anticipate that an app running in a web
browser would be exposed to this issue. To not take care of as part of the
problem solving process (= design) is criminal negligence.

I think better examples for your case would be things like Google Maps (that
allow very creative mash-ups with data from other domains), Amazon.com (that
has generated many secondary services using its extensive API) and, my
favorite example, AppleScript (that has allowed literally thousands of
scriptable software to tie various otherwise unrelated apps together to
create powerful workflows in many different industries).

The problem here is that the designers of these "enabling" technologies
thought through these issues in terms of architecture and connectivity,
created APIs that others can exploit and then watched uncontrolled
creativity blossom. I'm sure Google designers and engineers never
anticipated even half of the mash-ups people have done and will continue to
do. But the fact that Google opened up to allow that to happen was the
design, the purpose.

(Incidentally, this issue is more than theoretical to me because at this
very moment I'm designing a large-scale financial system that would allow
certain professionals to do things that I can't fully anticipate. I am
purposefully building the tooolbox to make that a possibility. Our SEC
authorities, however, don't like that to happen in certain conditions.)
 
Ziya
Nullius in Verba