Category Archives: Theory

I was on a panel at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 2010 meeting entitled Blasphemy or Pragmatics? When NOT to Follow User-Centered Design Techniques. I took the position that UCD is one of five approaches that designers can use to design products. Here are my slides.

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Mental models of how things work are partially shaped by failure. When something doesn’t work, we try to figure out why. But if we can’t find an answer, it just becomes frustrating…unless we can attribute it to a personality quirk, just like we do with people.

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Every once in a while, there are rumblings about how the design process should be more like the scientific method. Although I profoundly disagree with this (more in a moment), I can understand this impulse.

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Content strategy is all well and good, of course, but it has brought with it the rallying cry of “Content First!” and a million articles about how “Content is King.” Content is king…except when it’s not.

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There’s a tendency (at least among designers) to think that it’s designers who own the user experience. After all, designers are the ones who define it, right? This button goes there and it’s blue. But the more I think about it, the more I come to realize that ownership rests in those who provide the resources to get the product built, and in those who actually build the products: the developers and manufacturers. They are the true owners of the user experience.

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There is a crucial difference between design and advertising, and it is the same difference as between art and design, and that is intent.

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Post-industrial design is both a way of working and a way of thinking about products. It’s a way of working in that it considers the interactive behavior a product should engender before considering its physical form. There may be no physical form at all, in fact. Or, more accurately, the “form” is an area whose parameters are unseen by the naked eye.

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We’re coming up on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10. I’m a big supporter of this, and of Amnesty International, which works to protect these rights. Which got me to thinking: why isn’t there a list of users’ rights anywhere? What is the baseline that all users of every product everywhere should expect? So using the UDHR as a starting point, I drew one up.

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I was supposed to go to Design Engaged last week, but unfortunately had to drop out, and thus missed Nicholas Nova‘s talk “inflated deflated futures”. But now, thanks to Slideshare, I’ve had a chance to view it. And it’s great.

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