“The past” is filled with far more examples of products, innovative thinking, and success stories based on activity-centered research, magic, genius design, and just plain luck than UCD can claim even on its best day.

What’s cheap and easy is the idea that we can dissect a chef’s work and call it a recipe. That we can simply analyze genius and come out with a one-size-fits-all plan for success.

—Robert Hoekman, Jr.

Ouch. Definitely a hit to the old UCD ego, but I couldn’t agree more.

Sites that use tagging systems like Magnolia, Flickr, and Digg also provide insight into search behaviors, as each user defined tag illuminates the way in which users label content for retrieval. Simply search for a term you think people might use to find your site, then check out the tags that are associated with the items returned. It’s like peering inside your users’ heads!

1. Go to http://del.icio.us/url/
2. Enter a URL and click the “check url” button
3. Check out the “common tags” area in the right sidebar. I prefer to show a list of common tags to see how often a tag has been used, but cloud view will give you a sense of keyword weight, also.
4. Do this for your competitors’ sites, too

These keywords are useful for lots of things: copy writing, designing AdWords campaigns, and basic SEO insights about <meta> tags. Be sure not to place too much stock in these keywords, though, especially if you have a small sample of tags generated from del.icio.us. Keep in mind that those keywords are generated by del.icio.us users, who may constitute only a small segment of your site’s total audience. Their needs and motivations – and how they think about and tag your site – may be very different from other segments of your audience.

This method is simply a cheap, fast way to find out how some of your users think about your site.

A List Apart: Articles: Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry

• John Johnson
• Tom Thomas
• Brenda Bermuda
• Don Duck
• Joe Duck
• Michael Maus
• Michael Taus
• Ron McDonald
• Ron Wonald
• Joe Jones
• Marty Markowitz
• Nancy Nelson
• Omar Oliver
• Terrence Thomas
• Wendell Wu

It’s kind of embarrassing how easily I amuse myself.

Despite my frustration with needing to re-learn some CSS and Javascript, I’m glad I took the time to design and code the site myself. It was a nice reminder of the effort it takes to build a vision, an effort that I sometimes take for granted at my day job. I would never claim to be a graphic designer or a web developer, but spending time in both sets of shoes is, I think, an essential exercise for anyone in the user experience field.

Anyway, enjoy! Buy a book! Comments and criticism are appreciated.

Psychology postscript! My description of (and thinking throughout) the design process for this site triggered an association with my Myers Briggs personality type. The design effort for brooklynbookbinder.com definitely fits the description:

They regularly have to face the difficulties of bringing dreams into reality. The time and effort it takes is always more than what their intuition initially suggested. They are determined, perseverant, inspired and often see things just around the corner, into the near or far future.

Why didn’t I see this coming months ago? :p

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.