On Dec 19, 2007, at 12:51 PM, Jared M. Spool wrote: > Why is it important that designers distance themselves from the > evaluation side? Where is this coming from?
I'm not sure it's "important." I only distance myself from the likes of Nielsen simply because he has never built or designed anything in his life (that I'm aware of) and seems to go out of his way to make my job as a designer harder, not easier, by making absurdist proclamations to executives who want to believe his brings the truth because they have paid him a lot of money. If he actually took the time to practice what he preaches with useit.com, or even took more time to learn what kinds of compromises, solutions and constraints designers have to work with in order to actually build digital products, I might think differently. But he doesn't. He's still basically hurting the design profession more than he helps it, imho, so he reaps what he sows. However, outside of that, you have to recognize that designers are the most exposed people in companies in terms of their work. It's the one thing people can criticize and toss around opinions about all the time. So evaluation tends to make our lives even more stressful than it already is. To the degree that most of us have a really hard time learning to dealing with it. Let me put it this way: When I was working InDesign ten years ago (wow.. its been that long), I was managing the next versions of Photoshop and Illustrator at the same I was doing the design work on InDesign. The team was in Seattle, so I had to literally wake up at 5am every Tuesday, drive to San Jose Int'l Airport, catch a 6:30am flight to Seattle, drive to the office in downtown Seattle and get to work at around 9:30am. I worked all day, caught the evening 8:30pm flight back home and got back home around 11pm, only to have to do more work on stuff I missed that day. I did this every week for almost nine months straight. When I was there, we'd often have a 3pm review meeting, where... I kid you not... there were 9 to 12 people in a room to review the design work. Product managers, QA, engineers, even tech support folks. The purpose of the meeting was to do nothing but provide "feedback" on the design work I was doing. So basically, it was 9 to 12 people all giving me their opinions and I had to sit there and listen to them. Week after week. Needless to say, it got a little much for me to deal with, especially when their opinions or ideas went counter to the longer term design strategy I was implementing to make the Creative Suite possible. I don't care if people have opinions or evaluations of my work. Everyone has an opinion and part of the job being a designer is to deal with it, but it doesn't make us happy campers when its not done in a way that supports designers and their work. What I need are people who can not only give me feedback, but feedback I can actually do something with, or ideas that can be implemented or meet the same design constraints I have to use in designing the solution. Feedback that I can't do anything with comes across as complaints, and listening to complaints day in and day out can make one about as likable as the folks who sit at the DMV processing paperwork. So in order to get feedback from evaluations that a designer can actually do something with, the person providing the evaluation needs as much understanding about the problem as the designer. And I don't mean just the "user" understanding. I mean the business, the technology, visual, interaction, project deadlines, etc. I've worked with plenty of researchers and usability folks who get this. The ones who don't generally don't like me. -- Andrei Herasimchuk Principal, Involution Studios innovating the digital world e. [EMAIL PROTECTED] c. +1 408 306 6422 ________________________________________________________________ *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
