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Home > Meetings > January 2000
Customer Centered Design
Grant Skousen
7i design
January 26, 2000 — Intel , American Fork
Thank you Grant Skousen, Chair of NUCHI, who presented "Customer Centered Design" to sixteen folks, at Intel's American Fork campus. And thank you Intel for sponsoring the evening.
Highlights from the talk, slides and video . . .
- The transition from Product Checklist Battles to Productivity remains critical,
and is a point where many software companies fail. That is, while many software products have eagerly
thrown in the kitchen sink, and perhaps promoted a "more is better" campaign, it is the
ability to move past these features alone (for better or worse) to actually increasing the user's
productivity -- that makes for high quality, effective, useful, well-designed products.
(see the article Market Maturity, User Interface Engineering, world.std.com/~uieweb/market.htm)
- The Palm Pilot team (and the HandSpring team?) know this, and exemplify "less is more," the
deliberate use of contextual inquiry, observation, and interview of potential and actual users.
The rest is current history.
- QuickBooks (for small business users) and QuickBooks Pro (for many other business users)
rose from the Quicken HCI team having their consciousness raised! During home visits to observe
and learn from users, they recognized that many users were performing business tasks with their
Quicken [personal finance] software. Despite the efforts of Microsoft and others, Intuit continues
to lead the Personal and Small Business software market.
- From the Skousen professional archives -- while at WordPerfect, the design and engineering
teams struggled with a frequent end-user request for a faster Print Preview command. When the Human-Computer
Interaction professionals got in the loop, they found out that speed wasn't the core issue at all,
rather, it was that users really wanted an easy way to reformat text so that it might fit onto
a single page.
- Remember to listen to the user, watch the user to observe both the obvious and the subtle, and
get artifacts! Thank 'em too!
- The evening was capped with a twenty-minute flick, The Deep Dive, from ABC News Nightline,
which aired February 9, 1999. IDEO was highlighted. An opportunity to see how a premier
design shop identifies, conceptualizes, researches, formulates, brainstorms, persuades, and ultimately
delivers a better mousetrap, all within an interpersonally enriching and supportive environment.
The whole will always be greater than the sum of it's parts. Right? Perhaps you were reminded of
your company as well.
(see www.ideo.com/news.htm for the quicktime version)
Finally, Intel (and others) are shaking the trees for new HCI hires. Contact Grant for the latest.
All of us at NUCHI wish you the best. We look forward to hearing from you, and seeing you and your guests at the next meeting. Don't forget to bookmark our website and sign-up for our e-mail announcements and news.
Cheers,
Andy Schechterman, PhD
Secretary, NUCHI