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Subject:
From:
Rodney Fuller <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Rodney Fuller <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 20 Aug 2001 13:03:56 -0700
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--- mary keitelman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I also would like to see a developmental view of
> usability--how is user centered design successfully
> integrated into the development cycle?

This is one of the most interesting thing about this
discussion:  User Centered Design was developed to
fill in for some of the weaknesses of the traditional
waterfall method of software design.  Now that the
web has made design much more democratic no one has
asked if UCD still makes sense.  We just assumed that
it did.  What we don't know is if "usability" as
we practice it today is an artifact of the way IT
development was formalized in the 1970s and shrunk
wrapped in the 80s--or if with the web (the 90s)
you can now do design well for 90% of the world with
good writing and basic task design.  And if so then
what sort of usability will help us answer the
critical
issues we are seeing today:  content management, and
bizzare forms of feature creep.

Jared is very brave for raising this issue, and the
vote seems to be split on what we think he might find.
It will be an interesting study!  Thank god for UIE.
But I suspect that we will debate the results longer
than we should.

One example from kstrat will illustrate:  we did a
formal user study of one of our sites (users off
the street did three tasks/scenarios and were video
taped and answered two surveys).  All of our users
were single women in their 20's (because married
women don't tend to buy customized wedding invites
on line--they are funny that way.)  We found a lot
of great problems to fix with this study, but to
generalize our results we needed to know if these
users were "normal."  We asked them how they felt
about global ecommerce issues and measured them
against those national averages.  We also asked
them which sites they visited, and which sites
they shopped at.

The first answer to the last question was always
amazon or barnesandnoble.  But *ALL* of the other
answers given were for women's lingerie.  This
result is (i expect) a function of testing women
in their 20's in New York City and not a national
trend.  So we used the results as a sample of normal
users but didn't tell the client to only market
custom wedding invites on sites that sold women's
lingerie.  You need to be careful about your
conclusions--even when your methods are pure.

Rodney


Rodney



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