On Nov 28, 2007, at 11:20 AM, Robert Hoekman, Jr. wrote: > > Exactly. Metrics can tell us what, but they don't tell us why. We > cannot find out why w/o actually observing people. > > Eh - we can make a pretty dern good guess a lot of the time. Sure, > there are certain things you'll never notice without observing > people, but with experience, some decent educated guesses will solve > 80% of the usability problems.
The no brainer stuff I don't take issue with. It's the other 20% I'm speaking of. I'd much rather teach people to not make a "good guess" and be certain based on something more concrete. There are some of us in this field that have intuition, having been doing this so long that we know what the pattern means, that had proper training before getting into this field, or that quite simply are just really good designers. But that's a small percentage in the sum total of people doing design work. Yes there are plenty of good, well designed products out there, but they're terribly overshadowed by the number of poorly designed products. I think we need to be a bit more responsible in our statements and advocate using better methods for those getting into the field to start balancing the scales out a bit between bad and good design. Follow the guidelines until you know how and when you should break them. Cheers! Todd Zaki Warfel President, Design Researcher Messagefirst | Designing Information. Beautifully. ---------------------------------- Contact Info Voice: (215) 825-7423 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AIM: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Blog: http://toddwarfel.com ---------------------------------- In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
