UX News Round-Up for April 22, 2008
Design + Management: Want Respect? Smash the Table!
Dan Saffer quotes a fall 2007 Design Observer article in his blog post about designers and their relationship with management. Although there may be a persistent desire on the part of designers to get a place at the management table “where the big decisions are made,” Saffer reminds his readers that perhaps the place of the designer is not there:
At The Table, it is easy to have other concerns instead of just creating the best products possible: political concerns of gaining and retaining power, or financial concerns of running the company, or resource concerns about personnel, or the million other details it takes to run a business–many of which fight against putting out great products.
With the perspective and clarity of vision that often attends it, perhaps the designer is rightly, and best, an outsider. Saffer suggests that when the design job is done well, “the table will change.” “The best products change companies, markets, and, yes, possibly even the world. And when that happens, attention will be paid, respect given. You will be thanked for smashing The Table and giving them a new one.” What would serve a designer best, then, is not being counted within circle of power themselves, but having allies in it.
Usability: Don Norman, 25 Years In Usability
Don Norman takes stock of Usability and how the field has changed since he joined 25 years ago. He estimates the field has grown from 1,000 practitioners primarily in acadamia to over 50,000 individuals, with an additional half-million with part-time responsibilities.
Though perhaps the basics of Usability methodology have not changed, interfaces have undergone significant transformation– command line to GUI, one-button to two-button mice, and the birth of the web-based application. Norman suggests that having worked with these different interfaces over the years allows usability professionals to “generalize the underlying issues in interaction design” and “avoid being swayed by the surface appearance of the latest gizmo.”
Lastly, Norman reflects upon his own satisfaction as a Usability professional, doing work that allows him to ‘help humanity’ by strengthening business, and empower people to “control their destiny and their technology rather than be[ing] subjugated by computers.’ Norman concludes, Usability probably makes an even better profession now than it did 25 years ago, noting “we have job security as long as there’s stupid design in the world, and that’s forever: every new technology that comes along will be abused.”
User Research: Three kinds of search
Earlier this month, researchers from Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology and Queensland University of Technology reported findings from a study done to classify web searches. The study revealed that most queries can be categorized into one of three types: Informational, Navigational or Transactional. The study was the first published of its kind done using actual search data, analyzing 1.5 million searches from hundreds of thousands of users across various search engines. The paper will appear in “Information Processing and Management,” May 2008.
Interface Design: “Designing Software that Works for Everyone”
This is the tagline for the Fluid Project, a collaborative effort at creating an open-source “living library” of user interface components with special emphasis on accessibility and academic software. The project recently received new funding in the form of $2.5 million from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation for one of its main collaborators, The Adaptive Technology Center at the University of Toronto. The project is backed by now more than $8 million in funding, and other institutions involved include the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Cambridge among others. Corporate partners include IBM, Sun, and Yahoo.
Montparnas’ weekly news installment posts every Tuesday.
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