On Oct 6, 2008, at 7:19 PM, Andrei Herasimchuk wrote:
On Oct 6, 2008, at 3:46 PM, Peter Merholz wrote:
While you're wailing and gnashing your teeth over wounded pride...
If you'd like to get into a conversation over who can call the other
snippy names or pontificate on motives in flowery language in
attempt to belittle the other, I'll gladly take you up on that offer
outside the confines of this list.
GIRL FIGHT! GIRL FIGHT! (It had to be said. With apologies to all the
real girls out there.)
Yes, good designers would do such things, and have for decades (as
witnessed by Henry Dreyfuss' book, DESIGNING FOR PEOPLE, which, as
far as I can tell, was the first book on UCD). But, the majority of
designers *did not*, and clearly many felt it was necessary to
distinguish their efforts from this majority.
It's been like this for decades in the design profession, and well
before Dreyfuss even wrote his book. And note that in Designing for
People, Dreyfuss does a number of things well beyond what people
consider UCD practice... like... building real, full scale working
prototypes or doing competitive market research or finding ideas in
completely unrelated solutions to other problems that have nothing
to do with asking customers anything about anything.
Andrei is correct. UCD had nothing to do with Dreyfuss. I know, 'cause
I was there.
For those who care, UCD was born on the engineering side. As I
explained in my IA Summit Keynote (and revisiting in my upcoming UI13
Keynote -- register today at http://uiconf.com), UCD was a knee jerk
reaction to the times -- those times being the late 1970s and early
1980s.
We're talking the days before real personal computers (yes, there were
TRS-80s and Apple IIs, but they weren't being used in a business
context yet). In those days, computers had a history of being designed
for engineers and operators who would receive significant training for
simple functionality. The operators of the computers didn't care about
the data or, for that fact, the actual programs. They only cared about
running the job, distributing the results, then running the next job.
The computer itself didn't have to be easy to use or "user
friendly" (the term of the day at that time), because the users were
very well trained.
In the advent of "personal computing", (which happened with mini-
computer time share systems and solo-purpose devices, such as word
processing units -- remember the Wang 2200, the DEC WPS08, and the IBM
Displaywriter?), the focus shifted from trained operators that were
uninterested in the data, only in the operation, to untrained 'users'
that were very interested in the data and uninterested in the
operation. This is where the movement for designing for users, which
subsequently became user-centered design.
The key players here were John Gould & Jack Carroll at IBM, Ben
Schneiderman at UMaryland, Marilyn Tremaine (I'm don't remember where
she was at the time), John Whiteside & Dennis Wixon at DEC, Stu Card
at Xerox, Ginny Redish & Joe Dumas at AIR, and a handful of others who
I apologize for not remembering off hand. (I worked with the DEC team
at the time. I'm sure Chauncey will produce a long list of people I've
forgotten.) This was all pre-CHI, which had its first meeting in 1982
in Gaithersburg, where 970 people showed up, so it was well off the
ground by then. (I didn't go to that, but I was at the second one in
Boston the following year.)
The UCD movement was important because it gave us a way to talk with
the stakeholders and engineering managers (development was an
engineering discipline at the time) about how user interfaces needed
to actually interface with users.
While many of us were aware of other design disciplines, they seemed
way "out there". Aesthetics and form were far away from what we were
trying to do in the early days. In those days, it was all about pure
usability -- diagnosing frustration points, producing cognitive models
that explained them, and coming up with a thinking that would get past
that.
It wasn't until the late '80s and early '90s that people started
thinking in terms of formative evaluation techniques as something that
could be integrated into the development process. For example, it
wasn't until '89 that we started talking about paper prototyping
(based on work done by Laurie Vertelney at Apple) and its uses in a
development process.
It wasn't until '87 that we saw an integration of visual design with
UCD practice, from work presented at the CHI+GI conference in Toronto.
(Allison Druin's Noobie came to mind. A life size doll with digital
sensors, speech systems, and a video screen.)
So, UCD has predated most of the things we associate with UCD today.
And it had nothing to do with design as we think of it today.
And that ends today's history lesson. I hope you took notes because
this will all be on the final.
You want to point to Dreyfuss as the model for UCD? Great! I'm all
for it. Maybe we'll finally get people in this industry to stop
complaining when asked to learn how to draw, using products like
Photoshop and Illustrator in depth, code web standards markup,
script behaviors and build prototypes of their products for a
change. Sign me up.
Seems like an excellent motivation for revisionist history. I'm all
for it! Forget everything I said above. It was all Dreyfuss! :)
Jared
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