SIGIA-L Mail Archives: SIGIA-L: does it have to depend?
SIGIA-L: does it have to depend?
From: Jess McMullin (jess_at_cognissa.com)
Date: Tue Oct 16 2001 - 01:54:30 EDT
>I'll go to Jared Spool's motto, "It depends."
Well, maybe this is Jared's ex-motto, or at least not given with as much
cavalier attitude:
He recently said:
"We spent years promoting the "Well, it depends" attitude without ever
answering the questions we were asked. While it seems helpful at first, it
quickly turns out to be a negative -- people don't want to just be told "it
depends"; they want to know what to do differently." (from recent
WebWord.com interview)
So while it still sometimes depends, what answers is the user experience
field providing? I know I've used "it depends" as a cop out before, and
sometimes I really, really don't know. But I'd like to know. I'd like to
have some more solid answers. I'd like to have data, and analysis, and being
able to generalize from that to find answers to my clients' particular
challenges.
Some of that's here already. But there's so much we don't know. I've been
wondering lately - how much is actually knowable? Is this a field where we
can have solid answers? Or are there too many variables across different
projects to provide any meaningful, rich, broad set of guidelines?
I wonder where we'll be a decade from now...or even a few years out. Looking
back over the last 10 years, I'm not sure how my crystal ball is doing.
How's your crystal ball? Will we need to just focus on getting the process
down? Or will the field find guiding principles and useful conventions -
real world design patterns, or the language for richly describing and
modeling user experience?
cheers,
Jess
-------------------
Jess McMullin
www.interactionary.com
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