Certainly I think everyone will have some subconscious protocol they use to judge design. A lot of creativity comes from subjective assessments, and first impressions are also an important aspect to end-user empathy.
However, to be practical it's important to have some framework/system/process/protocol/method for judging a design. It's important to understand that each context (depending on the product, the company, the goal), and each phase of the design process (seed, sketch, prototype, etc.) will demand an appropriate way to interpret the design. I prefer a protocol which includes the first step as stating the context or problem framing. I try to promote these high level categories (derived from the book Innovation by Carlson & Wilmot): Needs - problem framing and context Approach - the design itself Benefits to Costs ratio - what do you gain, what do you sacrifice with the given context Competition/Alternatives - your benchmarking, gap analysis, etc. As you can see there's much more about assessing the impact and context of the design than the actual quality of the design itself (still very important of course). The categories were originally intended to act as a complete proposition for product innovation, but also serve just the design aspect well, too. These are very high level descriptions and you can rename them to be more specific to a given project, but as overarching categories I think they remain quite important. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=40212 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
