Comments on: Centred or Informed?

By: Mark Boulton

Mark Boulton — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 06:51:36 +0000

Yeah, I’ve had some resistance but some clients have been really open to it. In fact it’s the reason why some clients would choose working with me rather than a more design focussed agency.

The challenge with other clients who may be retisant to the, in their opinion, additional cost is to work with the user centric approach being adopted as a cultural shift - something that is integral to the entire process, it’s not just the ‘extra’ thing you do at the beginning.

People generally respond well to the user centric approach. They seem to understand the benefits and of course you are talking their language - eg the customers or the audience of their site.

By: Ryan Nichols

Ryan Nichols — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 02:12:05 +0000

Have you had resistance in estimates from that? I can imagine in large projects those early stages are very expensive. Most of my work are for more intimate projects and I don’t run into that. Curious what kind of projects you do, how much it runs, and how people respond.

By: Mark Boulton

Mark Boulton — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 05:34:26 +0000

That’s a great comment Ryan. And Allan, you’ve got a good point about not working with clients who resist such a culture shift.

I guess my problem is that UCD, from a clients point of view, is seen as an expensive thing you do before a project starts. This is before the client actually sees anything (usually they want to see flashy designs right?)

By: Ryan Nichols

Ryan Nichols — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 06:05:23 +0000

Yeah I agree mark. I think a big component here is scope of your projects. Just like you, I had subscribed to the UCD process/principles. But I think I had to take it as that, principles. If I understood the idea behind what the big boys do, I could bring it down to my situation and choose what could be utilized and what was unecessary.

For me a large part of UID comes to your #1 item, professional hunch. In many situations as long as your *mentally* focused an seeing the users perspective, you can make the big decisions. I love what veen is saying. Whenever I’ve explained putting the users first in design, I always come back to the idea of the ‘Pretender’ TV show. It’s like having a type of empathy that can put you in someones shoes. You can absorb everything you can about the user. Then you try to *become* them, sit down and look at things from their angle. Everything comes from whatever you can learn about them from interviews, research, yada yada yada. But the magic is being able to draw creative solutions out of that understanding, and continually doing it through all the work from design, interaction, writing copy, choosing colors, or anything else that happens.

I think in the end, it will come down to the individuals or teams’ state of mind more than the scientific process followed. In other words, that print director...well might as well fire him because he probably will never understand true UCD even if you forced him to follow the process. :)

By: Allan White

Allan White — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 07:23:35 +0000

Interesting - I find design and business philosophies that resonate with me contain some semblance of balance. This is the case here - I too find UCD, in some forms, to be a bit too dogmatic.

I also find that projects that would require a lot of culture shift on the clients behalf are just not worth the effort. Sometimes it’s a struggle just to sell the concept of prototyping. I tend not to seek out those clients a second time.