Richard I. Anderson
ABSTRACT
Often, the multidisciplinary design of business and interactive system concepts is not particularly collaborative nor nearly as "user-centered" as the organization doing the design claims. This paper describes efforts at changing that within a high speed and low resource environment by involving all disciplines in early user research and in the synthesis of the findings and their application to design activities. The focus is on two high-profile design projects, one involving personal media management and the other involving organizational knowledge management. We describe what we did and why, and how well what we did worked, with particular attention to the affects of organizational culture and politics on success.
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Index Terms
- Improving the design of business and interactive system concepts in a digital business consultancy
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Reviews
Bayard Kohlhepp
There is an acute need to improve our design processes by focusing on users. It is our only hope for collectively postponing the end of the IT age, and individually, for hanging on to our IT careers. The title of this report sounds like the guidance we need, a just-in-time solution that will replenish our depleted inventory of ideas. The title is misleading, however. The authors' success is mixed, at best, leaving the reader to ponder whether this glass was half empty or half full. To summarize, the three authors recount two successive projects within the same large consulting firm. While their roles shifted from one project to the next, they stayed in positions of advocacy or implementation of user-centered design activities. On both projects, the user-centered activities yielded strong benefits, but the benefits were always directly opposed and totally mitigated by corporate lethargy, office politics, and human nature. On the positive side, the paper is not that long, and is a very easy, nontechnical read. If you read carefully and take notes, you can probably extract some points that would benefit your own work, or at least give you some starting points for research of your own. On the negative side, there are few hard facts and few useful details. It is anecdotal evidence at best, and the only conclusion that can be squeezed out of it is that corporate processes are hard to change. Online Computing Reviews Service
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