There seems to be a bit of a trend at the moment, within developmental circles to just add a few wireframes and develop a prototype or two, and then you can declare you are across the user experience design process.
The thing is User Experience is a lot more than just a few simple techniques, it’s an entire collaborative design process, in a way it’s not just a single methodology at all.
This lack of being a single methodology may be part of the issue.
Over the years I have been trying to implement UX design tools and techniques into my day-to-day production cycle. This would be very simple if all my projects where large ones with moderate size teams. However business reality is that this is not often the case. The projects I tend to work on, as an independent user experience consultant, can be with a large team for a limited amount of time, to 8-24 weeks as the sole user experience practitioner on a project.
More often it is the case that the projects are just micro projects for small business. These projects can be anything from 2-3 weeks in length.
During last week I got to see Jared Spool keynote at IAsummit via a streaming into Second Life. Okay its wasn’t that great, the streaming not the presentation. After reviewing the presentation later. It’s apparent to me that some people maybe missing the point of methodologies.
Jared’s core comments are summed up well by Mia Northrop and Molly from NLC Internet Marketing Blog, basically he proposes that we should be moving away from UCD and start to own up to the point that we haven’t really been practicing it anyway. Thumps up Jared.
Gary Barber
I'm an independent User Experience Designer. I design and enhance complete web user experiences (websites), usable web interfaces, build web architectures, prototypes, conduct usability & accessibility tests or audits.
I just make your websites better than they are.
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