Personally, I love UCD, even if we as a design community don't/can't agree on what it really means. All it has meant in my career is this:
I can go to a project stakeholder, engineer, or executive, say the words "User Centered Design" and they have somewhat of an idea of what that means. Which more or less is that we'll end up w/ a better result if we get to know the human beings actually using our products and design based on what we find out, while still mixing that process with technological constraints and business objectives. I've never had a stakeholder (or a designer) say: "UCD?! No! That means we won't consider any other factors besides just what the user needs!!" or "No! That means we can't sketch or prototype, or write web standard front end code". Come on, people :) The bottom line for me is that UCD, or at least the way it's understood by the non-design community, makes products better most of the time, period. I really don't care whether or not the definition of UCD includes sketching, modeling or prototyping, or if the design community wants to get into semantic debates about what it is and isn't. Jeff ________________________________________________________________ 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
