"You don't employ any programmers. That is both incredible and interesting. How do you "design" without programmers?
Programmers always do design. However they design PROGRAMS, not products. They design programs in such a way that they run efficiently on digital computers and can be easily controlled by other engineering professionals.
The design we do is very different. We are less concerned about execution efficiency (although we assure that it is not ignored) than we are about assuring that normal human users will not be frustrated with the product.
We design the product from the outside in, rather than from the inside out. We call ourselves "interaction designers" because we are primarily concerned with the program's behavior with respect to human users. Often, this means interface design, but behavior is never limited just to the screen.
The design that programmers do will always be compromised by a powerful conflict of interest. They must decide between accommodating the user and accommodating their own ease of programming. They can never be expected to make an impartial call, and their design will always force the user to compensate for weaknesses in the code, rather than the other way around.
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Why should users come first? What is the competitive advantage of being user-centered?
As I pointed out above, shipping a good product on the first version instead of on the third or fourth version can save a lot of money. What's more, those first badly designed, hard to use interfaces can alienate people. Yes, people might use your badly designed product if it is the only way to get their work done, but they won't have much loyalty to you or your product, and that makes you very vulnerable to competition.
Design is also an excellent tool for gaining control of the product development process. Most development managers don't really know what their product will look like until the programmers hand it to them. The only tools they have for controlling development is a list of features and a due date. That's like having to order dinner in a restaurant from just a shopping list and a time limit. A proper design is a detailed description of what the product will be when it is done. Knowing that, it is much easier to get to "done" faster, cheaper, and with fewer wasted steps.
What is user apartheid? How often do you see it? Why is it such a problem?
Most programmers and development managers merely accept as an unavoidable aspect of software that users must be trained; that they must become "computer literate." I do not believe that this is true. However, by accepting this false assumption, you deny any person unwilling or unable to become "computer literate" from the benefits of using computers. In the past, this merely meant that those people could not become computer professionals. Today, however, computers are dominating EVERY industry, and those non-computer-literate people will soon be shut out of the mainstream of society. This is brutal, unfair, and unnecessary.
For one example, consider shopping. Five years ago, everyone shopped in their local stores and only a very few purchases were made with computers. Today, just a few percent of all items are bought using computers, but certainly you can see with the rapid acceptance of ecommerce--and the obvious advantages it brings--that soon the overwhelming majority of goods will be bought and sold over the Internet. If a person is not a skilled computer user then they will be forced to purchase things the old-fashioned, slow, expensive way.
--Interaction Design: The Guru Speaks
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