Janet Hill:
>Repeat after me: There is no typical user. There is no typical user.
There is no typical user.
>Persuade us with actual data, carefully collected, clearly defined,
and thoughtfully considered.
Let me explicitly oppose the statements above. It's not so much that I
oppose the sentiments so much as the context they operate in. That
context is overwhelming failure.
If we designed lifeboats we would certainly attend to the variations
among potential passengers. There are no typical lifeboat users. We
would want to do studies too, and consider them carefully. But it's
April 14, 1912 and the Titanic is sinking. No matter how you do the
numbers, there aren't enough lifeboats. It's not an issue, it's a
disaster. It's not a problem, it's a mess.
The contemporary OPAC is a Titanic. It's not suboptimal, it's broken.
It's broken in a thousand ways, but the most important ways are
obvious to everyone.
The OPACs that are offering hope are products of the passion of an
individual or small group operating with minimal restrictions, a
can-do spirit and a commitment to iterate continuously, not
large-scale user studies.
In the rest of tech, also, I'd favor passion, freedom, talent and
continuous improvment over a traditional process of surveys, specs and
user studies. That's certainly the trend of the last five years. But
we shouldn't even be having this argument given the state of the
situation.
So, repeat after me, instead: Not suboptimal, broken!
Received on Tue Feb 05 2008 - 13:05:12 EST