There are a couple of interesting discussions occurring on IxDA right now. In one, Leisa Reichelt poses the question guaranteed to get a response: "What software companies are operating successfully — right now — without some kind of UCD/UED in the beginning of their product development cycle?"
Jared Spool points out that, well, a lot of companies are doing just this–Apple, Google, and Amazon among them–and they’re doing quite well thank you:
There is no correlation between effort/resources spent on UCD/UED and
the usability of the results.
Please Jared don’t hurt ‘em! What he’s saying should come as no surprise, really, nor should it be offensive to any UCD practitioner. I’d be surprised to learn that any design framework as broad as UCD was correlated with increased customer satisfaction or product usability. Gifted designers understand that UCD methods are just another set of tools that give them a way to analyze a problem. More importantly, as Donna Maurer explains, the best designers know when to reach for these tools:
There is a huge difference between using a formal, defined UCD process and being user-centred.
Many of my little projects don’t have a formal UCD element (I don’t do ethnography, make personas, write scenarios, do participatory design sessions or usability test) but that doesn’t mean I don’t know anything about the users or think about them. And it doesn’t mean the result is awful. Sometimes it is truly not worth the effort.
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