The Whiteboard: Tracking Usability Issues: To Bug or Not to Bug?

Most development organizations track software bugs and their severity in a corporate database, which is shared with product development and tech support teams. We find, however, that these same organizations seldom have a standard method, if any, of tracking usability issues. Usability practitioners communicate usability problems through reports, highlight tapes, and formal briefings, but are these methods adequate for tracking usability problems through successive cycles of product development?

Wilson, Chauncey E. and Kara P. Coyne. Interactions (2001). Articles>Usability>Groupware

Systems Thinking: A Product Is More Than the Product

A product is actually a service. Although the designer, manufacturer, distributer, and seller may think it is a product, to the buyer, it offers a valuable service. In reality a product is all about the experience.

Norman, Donald A. Interactions (2009). Articles>User Interface>User Experience>Usability

On Creation and Consumption

While the design of democracy is a wonderful thing, democratic design is less positive. We’ve heard over and over that “everyone is a designer,” and that through a combination of user-generated content, ubiquity of access, and new tools, design has finally made its way out of an ivory tower and into the grasp of the masses. What, exactly, have the masses gotten their grubby paws into? Can one truly claim to be a designer when they upload a picture to Facebook or remix a video for YouTube?

Kolko, Jon. Interactions (2009). Design>Content Management>Social Networking>Participatory Design

Research Automation as Technomethodological Pixie Dust

Timothy de Waal Malefyt’s recent article in American Anthropologist details how corporations are turning to “multiple ethnographic vendors to compete for projects in bidding wars.” I am more interested in how such technomethodolgies are being touted. They supposedly offer efficiency gains through transformation, compression, or automation of research process. Technologies of automation have always been coupled seductively with cost savings, and this area is no exception; there are plenty of services competing for business by offering quicker, faster (often capitalized: FASTER) results-time is money and less time is cheaper. So what is cut to save money, and what technologies allow for services to compress research strategy and plan, research engagement and analysis, and research reporting?

Churchill, Elizabeth. Interactions (2009). Articles>Research>Online