“ Development is a series of tradeoffs, often with incompatible constraints. Multiple factors compete for attention, each factor often demanding a solution that is incompatible with that required by another factor. Marketing, engineering, usability experts all champion their favored approach, each correct in their assessment, but nonetheless, each voicing different and incompatible concerns.
… success in the early stages of the technology marketplace favors technology-centered, feature-driven products. Customers clamor for more and better technology: engineers become experts at providing a stream of continual improvements in power, increased features, all at decreased cost. In this world, engineering rules the show.
Engineers reluctantly cede a place for marketing, and the reluctance is quite visible.
Marketing, moreover, becomes primarily feature-driven: query the existing customers for the features they desire most and pressure the engineering team to add them to the product, often with little regard, understanding, or even interest upon the impact on the coherence and integrity of the product. These are technology-driven customers, customers who purchase their products based upon technological accomplishments, upon novelty and lists of features.
In the latter stages of a technology, the game changes considerably. The technology is taken for granted. Factors such as the total user experience play a major role: customers want convenience and lack of hassle. This new entry, user experience, is not well established. Nobody quite knows how to deal with it.
The engineering team thinks it already understands user experience. After all, their previous customers were happy. The engineers themselves have no trouble with the product. Who are these new customers who need so much hand-holding? What’s the matter with them, anyway.
The marketing group thinks it already understands user experience. After all, marketing is in close touch with the customer: it knows first-hand what they want. Do they want ease of use? Sure, add it to the list of features. Do they want an attractive product, sure, hire a graphics designer to make it look pretty. Each item gets added to the list of things to be accomplished, as if the total user experience were a feature like “more speed” or “more memory” that can be purchased or added on to an established design.
… user experience is just another add-on … ease-of-use comes late in the game: after all, how can you make a product easy to use before it has been built?
First we build it, say the engineers, then we bring in those user interface folks to add some graphics and menus and make it easy to use.
… technical writers: how can you describe how to use a product until it is all finished, so there is actually something to write about? The writer’s job comes at the end.
Marketing provides a list of essential features: the engineers state what neat new technical tricks and tools they are ready to deploy. The engineers build the device, putting as many new technologies to work as they can within their allotted time and budget, squabbling with marketing along the way over which of those features really matter and which don’t. Then after all is finished and the product ready to ship, call in the technical writers to explain it to the customers. Call in the graphics and industrial designers to make it look pretty. Call in the user interface experts to make it usable.
Guess what: this process doesn’t work. … simply have to look around us at those high-technology products. “
… why so many telephone help lines are required, (
but not available in flight).
Read on …
https://www.nngroup.com/articles-wan...nt-reorganize/
‘The Invisible Computer’ Don Norman 1998
https://jnd.org
Also
https://jnd.org/people-centered-not-tech-driven-design/
If you can think of a clever solution in a few hours, assume many others have already done so.
I learn more by being wrong than by being right
It's not you. Bad (
systems) are everywhere.
Failures? No -- Learning Experiences
Simplicity is in the mind
Design for real people
Don't be logical
P.S. also ‘Being Analog’
https://jnd.org/being_analog/