Don’t know if you use Wikipedia, but out of idle curiousity I browsed over to check out the entries for user-centered design and interaction design.
Not bad, but they could stand some improvement.
Anyone out there up to the task?
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I just read a post at IASlash about Chris Fahey’s series of articles at his site graphpaper.com that questions the usefulness of user research.
My first reaction was “This guy’s a nutcase.”
Then I read the first article, “User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 1: Design vs. Science.”
I don’t think he’s a nutcase. I do think he’s a provacateur with an incomplete understanding of the difference between science and scientific methods.
In general, the article is well-written, and the argument at first seems to hold water. But after considering Fahey’s points, I concluded that this was just another canard in the long-running pseudo-argument between design and usability/user research.
Here’s my main beef with the series:
1. Fahey seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between *science* and *scientific methods*. They are not synonymous. Science is the testing of a falsifiable theory by empirical, well-controlled experimental methods. The use of quasi-experimental methods in usability and user research is not science by any definition. But he consistently refers to it as such.
2. Fahey is not against user research per se. He’s against poorly done or misapplied user research. Well duh. Who’s not opposed to that? That’s like coming out against drunk driving or spitting in public. For this reason, his argument is mostly trivial.
This is not to say that *design itself* is trivial – far from it. I agree with Fahey when he says that research findings should not – in fact cannot – be translated easily into design. Design, like many creative endeavors, is an emergent phenomenon. You can’t map research directly to design.
Nonetheless, his argument is specious.
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