Usability Quote of the Day

May 23, 2012

There's something very odd going on here. If designers made completely unrealistic assumptions about the physical world when designing technology, then we would blame them (and likely sue them) for technical incompetence. Yet when they make grossly unrealistic assumptions about human nature... we don't blame the designers, we blame the unfortunate people who are just trying to do what the design requires. -- Kim Vicente, The Human Factor, p. 45.    (via interaction-design.org)

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Strategy by Design

A very practical and philosophical approach to the role of design ...

"People need to have a visceral understanding -- an image in their minds -- of why you've chosen a certain strategy and what you're attempting to create with it. Design is ideally suited to this endeavor. It can't help but create tangible, real outcomes.

If you dig into business history, you see that the same thing occurred with the quality movement. As business strategist Gary Hamel has pointed out, there was a time when people didn't know what quality manufacturing was and therefore didn't think about it. Nevertheless, they were engaged with quality -- they created products of good or bad durability and reliability. Then thinkers such as W. Edwards Deming deconstructed quality -- they figured out what it was and how to improve it. As soon as people became conscious of it, manufactured goods improved dramatically.

The same thing needs to happen with design. Organizations need to take design thinking seriously. We need to spend more time making people conscious of design thinking -- not because design is wondrous or magical, but simply because by focusing on it, we'll make it better. And that's an imperative for any business, because design thinking is indisputably a catalyst for innovation productivity. That is, it can increase the rate at which you generate good ideas and bring them to market. Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems. When you bring design thinking into that strategic discussion, you join a powerful tool with the purpose of the entire endeavor, which is to grow." continued ... (Via Fast Company)

Research in Design Thinking - User Interface Design, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Ergonomics

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