OzCHI 2006: Donna Maurer puts UCD in its Place

'Focus less on user-centred, and more on design,' said Donna Maurer, in combative mood, as she addressed the OzCHI 2006 conference in Sydney last month. 'There is no correlation between having a UCD team and producing good stuff. Some UCD teams produce garbage; some companies manage very well without.'

Viewing her keynote's theme of "User-centred design in Practice – is it working?" from a practitioner perspective, the independent interaction designer and information architect pulled apart various Gods of usability: 'Jakob Nielsen should be removed from the galaxy – teach principles, not rules,' she insisted.

Nielsen peddles the idea that developers are stupid and our community treats them like they are dumb, she went on. But many usability practitioners are in over their heads, she suggested, making design recommendations without any design training and not staying with what they know best.

Running through some 'typical' characters to be found in UCD at present, from the experienced practitioner to someone with a couple of years' website development experience, she turned and said:

'Notice I just stereotyped everyone. I hope you think about that when you use personas. I don't use personas, but I'm not going to talk to you about that just now..'

Instead, she listed several other points she believes UCD professionals need to take to heart:
* Eliminate design from tests
* Don't recommend changes unless trained
* View usability is a quality, not a process
* Stop selling usability, start selling design
* Stop acting like the centre of the universe
* Pay more attention to what you do – know your own value.

She said that consultants coming in were more useful as mentors than delivering work themselves, so that skills could be passed on. And she advocated deconstructing designs, by working out which parts of the puzzle had created the outcome. 'How do I need to think to do that? How do you teach people to think that way?' she asked as illustrative questions.

Some time was spent in looking at the new sites such as Digg, Etsy, Upcoming and Threadless Tshirts, all of which rely on interaction with their users to make them what they are. She contrasted the development process of a site that is always in 'beta' and works with people's feedback, with the user research and testing approach. But in looking at the applications that these sites use, she acknowledged that one problem with Ajax and the like is that a lot of people have come up the web development route and have no experience designing rich applications.

The audience was split by the talk. Some agreed that the community has promoted critiquing over creating, and that some practitioners are scared of design. Others were dismayed by her suggestion that iterative improvements and testing were not a productive way to arrive at good design.

She was also asked to give her response to a recent attack on the discipline of IA by Adam Greenfield (see IA or not IA). Clearly unhappy at the things he put in his article, she conceded cheerfully that everything he'd said about information architecture, she'd just said about usability.

Associated Link: OzCHI 2006 programme

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