Almost everything I've read in UI design until very recently was about user-centered design. It seemed to make a lot of sense but then when I read that there was a book "Designing the Obvious", by Robert Hoekman, and his rather disparaging posts about user-centered design that also seemed to make sense.
One thing I feel very strongly is that the user is not "other", that I am such rearing-to-go user myself and I identify with other users. I mean, we are all users and yet some of us are not able to put ourselves in the shoes of other people using their systems when really in a lot of cases it can be pretty straightforward to do so. I guess it's like we all have emotions and yet some of us (well, not me) are much better at empathising with other people's emotions. As we all do, I "use" a lot and I find so much of bad user design seems to be just mind-boggling thoughtlessness. To give a couple of examples: Where I work, a scrollable text box that was known to often contain a lot of text and was constantly scrolled by the users was reduced to three lines "because of space constraints" - in fact it would've been very easy to rearrange things on the interface to maintain the original size of the text box. That text box deeply offended me and I often thought about it. I just scratched my head and thought "How could you possibly do that? It's a total pain." People say that users aren't considered - sometimes I wonder if some people just like to torture them. I have just spent two weeks at the Sydney Film Festival. On the website they said that in response to feedback they had made it possible this year for attenders to redeem tickets for voucher packages online. In past years, you could buy single tickets online but for voucher packages you had to submit each voucher at the venue in exchange for a ticket. Well, d'uh. They surely didn't need feedback to know that a significant customer body will, of course, want to be able to redeem vouchers online rather than wait in long queues and panic about missing the beginning of their film. I bought a 50 voucher package and was delighted with this news - until I went to redeem my first voucher. You seriously would not believe how many buttons I had to press to get a single ticket (at least 15) and repeat exactly the same process for the following 49. I even had to put in my name, address and phone number for every single ticket. They said something on the website about the process not being as "seamless" as they'd hoped. It was RSI-inducing but I plowed on because once I'd started on the online path it was actually a much slower process to redeem vouchers at the venue. I did thoroughly enjoy the festival but I would've enjoyed that little bit more without all the button pressing. Regards, Petra Liverani ________________________________________________________________ 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
