Some History to THAT Document

Catriona Campbell of The Usability Company has given an insight into the development process of the Quality Framework for Website Design that has been causing news recently. She was speaking at the AIGA Experience Design meeting on eGovernment in London last week.

She described how she and Brian Shackel fell into their involvement with the document. It was a team of designers, webmasters and the creative directors of a couple of external agencies meeting originally to plan a document on design which Campbell and Shackel found themselves joining.

'I raised my hand and asked: are you going to talk about design, or user-centred design?' said Campbell. 'Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to say it until the third meeting.'

The embryonic document was subsequently changed to be more concerned with usability, but much came as an add-on to a design rich, research poor starting point.

'It was meant to be about design and it was lucky we got something about ucd and usability in at all,' concluded Campbell.

The document has been criticised by the usability community for poor integration of usability practices, ignoring the value of iteration and a - now perhaps demystified, though still inappropriate - over-reliance on a couple of voices. Nonetheless, everyone has seen the value in a Government document that formally embraces user-centred design as a recommendation for public sector websites.

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