A meme has been following me around the last few weeks. Several times I’ve heard UX practitioners bemoan the fact that their project or corporate leaders have as much as said “we just don’t have the time to do the usability work right now, we’ll come back to that.”
As we all know this isn’t as effective as doing the iteration and design validation up-front. Taking the “we’ll add in the usability later” approach just yields nasty surprises down the line. But my question isn’t “why do people still think like this?” It’s part of human nature. Or project management nature, at any rate.
The real question is why our field doesn’t have better defenses against this. I mean, we know that in certain crunch times we’re going to get pushed on to shorten our processes and either go light on or skip our design iteration and validation. Yet it almost always leads to rework, lower user satisfaction, etc etc.
Are we just slaves to the “fast-good-cheap” iron triangle? How do others in the field push back on engineering and management in these situations?
My colleague Kate Caldwell pointed out that my design-related Twitter hashtags were, well, kinda lame. She suggested using #gooddesign and #baddesign instead.
I agree. Hive mind, please adjust your neural circuitry appropriately.
Just noted this article in ArsTechnica about an HP netbook that ships with a Linux distro…and no access to the command line.
Now as loyal readers (all four of you) know, I’ve slagged on Linux in the past as being not ready for the masses. But I do acknowledge that many people are doing a lot of hard work to improve it. And I explicitly acknowledge that one of Linux’s major advantages is the incredible power and flexibility available from the command line.
So it just seems silly to ship a Linux PC with no access to the command line. What was the thinking here? That allowing access to the command line would give n00bs too much rope with which to hang themselves?
I’ve never thought that users have to be protected from themselves at all costs. Yes, it makes sense to constrain certain operations and guide users along well-defined paths for certain tasks. But exploring from the command line is one of the elemental experiences of using Linux, and is *the* way that motivated users learn more about the capabilities of that particular operating system.
Readers? What are your thoughts on this? Should netbook customers be shielded from the Linux command line?
Hat tip to @hannusalonen on Twitter for pointing me to this Engadget article about Samsung’s “Unified UI” initiative.
My take: similar to Tog’s in that consistency with user expectations is most important. I’ve been part of several x-product consistency and commonality efforts in my career, and all were misguided to varying degrees. The biggest danger I’ve seen in these initiatives is the wrong-headed effort to impose metaphor, terminology and workflow “consistency” on products that support different operations.
Here’s some clear warning signs that you’re trying too hard for consistency: are you and your team sitting for hours in meeting rooms, churning on whether to name a navigation element “Home” or “Top”? Is someone pounding the table with their shoe in a Krushchev-like fit, angrily denouncing the labeling of a button?
No, that’s not a typo or PHP code run amok. That’s the hashtag I’m fixin’ to use on Twitter to denote “Good Design of the Day” and “Bad Design of the Day” tweets that I, uh, tweet.
Y’know how I was using the “Questionable_Design” tag on Flickr so people could tag pictures of good/bad design? Yeah, it didn’t exactly catch fire and go viral. (Although it has been useful for me to classify design pics that I upload.)
So I’m giving Twitter hashtags a try. Feel free to join in the fun. Got an example of good design? Tweet it and add “#gdotd”. Bad design? Tweet it and add “#bdotd.”
I feel like Steve Martin in “The Jerk“, when he gets his first royalty check. (Only mine is really more like 250, not 250K…) I just received the first royalty payment on Usability Success Stories, the book I put out in early 2007. Total: $437 USD.
I’m actually not disappointed. Quite frankly I’m surprised the book earns anything. Hey, it’s the first one. And if it did suddenly start selling like hotcakes (do those actually sell well?), I’d want some formal mechanism to share with the chapter contributors, as it was an edited volume (with three of the chapters by me).
