“User-centered design was born in the 1980s, amidst a world filled with frustration with blinking VCR clocks and computer command lines. Up until this time, developers focused on making the devices work, giving little heed to how they’d be used. Terms like “user friendly” and “easy to use,” buzzwords for the UCD movement, soon became as common as “new and improved” on laundry soap.Fast forward 25 years and it now seems the foundations of user-centered design are now disintegrating. Notable community members are suggesting UCD practice is burdensome and returns little value.
There’s a growing sentiment that spending limited resources on user research takes away from essential design activities. Previously fundamental techniques, such as usability testing and persona development, are now regularly under attack. And let’s not forget that today’s shining stars, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the iPod, came to their success without UCD practices.Is it time for user-centered design to evolve into something else? Or is there something else happening in our world of experience design that makes UCD obsolete? Should something else occupy the center of design”
Journey to the center of Design with Jared Spool. Watch the videos!
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This is combining in my mind with a lot of other stuff and probably going in a direction other than what Spool intends. My graduate research is looking at structuring usability studies as role playing exercises produces richer results. On one side, that's a methodology question. But it's also an attempt to inject a little fun into the process, which I think can be argued to lean more towards Spool's tricks end of the spectrum rather than dogma. I'm also in a UCD course this semester and getting ethics approval from two campuses (my grad program and the campus where I work) is taking forever. I may not get approved in time to get course credit for the card sort study I want to run. I'm gonna try to hammer these ideas into a paper topic as a plan B. If you have any resources to share as to making the feedback loop more fun in order to get higher quality feedback, I'm all ears.
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