::scr Drooling GUI

[celia romaniuk]

On Thu, 7 Mar 2002, David Cantrell wrote:

> Oh, GOOD sigmonster!
> 
> -- 
> Lord Protector David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david
> 
>     It's my experience that neither users nor customers can articulate
>     what it is they want, nor can they evaluate it when they see it
>         -- Alan Cooper

That's a classic example of how phrases out of context are misleading. 

Taken on face value, this means 'don't bother talking to people either
before or after you design'. And that is not what Cooper says in the
conversation from which the quote comes (at
http://www.fawcette.com/interviews/beck_cooper/page3.asp). 

After that quote he says:

"... you have the customer and/or user, and they tend to do what we call
"automating the pain." They say, "What is it we're doing now? How would
that look if we automated it?" Whereas, what the design process should
properly be is one of saying, "What are the goals we're trying to
accomplish and how can we get rid of all this task crap?" "

So he's saying that the designer needs to dig more deeply into the problem
at hand than simply replicated current processes. People actually involved
in the process are so used to it that they don't abstract it much; and
furthermore, people are usually not skilled designers. So no, they won't
really be able to design a good system; and creating one that actually
works for them isn't simply a matter of putting a screenshot in front of
them and asking what they think. It's more complicated than that. Which is
what keeps people like me in a job.

Celia