On Oct 13, 2009, at 9:05 AM, Bryan Minihan wrote:
Case in point is Remedy, the incident management tool. I've seen a half-dozen practitioners tackle Remedy with scathing criticisms and very useful recommendations for improvement. However, Remedy has always been one of the worst-designed applications in the market (well, until last I saw it 3 years ago). It does no good to redesign the front-end of an application which provides no straightforward facility to improve same, except via field arrangement on the page.
Sounds like somebody picked the wrong UCD/consulting company to do the work. If the team doing the research doesn't involve the design and dev team then you have a problem.
When we, we being my company Messagefirst, do research work, we start by understanding the business objectives, goals, support problems, technology behind it, etc. We do our research. We meet with the core team to do an initial review of the findings and work them to figure out which research findings are more critical to their business for the coming 3-9 months. Those are the ones we'll focus on for the research report/readout. The other items don't get left out, but are added in as additional findings.
Our recommendations, or considerations as they are sometimes called, do involve the design and development team to provide some guidance and direction w/o locking them into a solution. We like to give the designers and developers some flexibility to pick the most appropriate design/development solution based on the stated problem and consideration/recommendation. And we typically help provide guidance and feedback once they come up with the solution.
Now, as to Remedy, couldn't agree more. We're working with a client right now to redesign their help desk/incident management tool. It's not Remedy, but a competitor to Remedy. Most of these tools are horrible from a UX perspective. They were designed by engineers, focused on the technology first and slapped some lipstick on it to make it look tolerable. But once again, Bryan, you are citing a problem with a design process, not usability testing itself.
Cheers! Todd Zaki Warfel Principal Design Researcher Messagefirst | Designing Information. Beautifully. ---------------------------------- Contact Info Voice: (215) 825-7423 Email: t...@messagefirst.com AIM: twar...@mac.com Blog: http://toddwarfel.com Twitter: zakiwarfel ---------------------------------- In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. ________________________________________________________________ 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
