Title: The irreverent (and slightly bloody) history of UX design
Context: The user experience of human development could use some process refinements.
Synopsis: Humanity is a product. Leaving aside the divine nature of the “intelligent designer” argument (after all, would an “intelligent” designer really have not solved the whole tonsil thing already?) we are assuredly a work in progress. We iterate across generations and timelines, we optimize for desirability, and try — succeeding all too infrequently — to minimize our shared defect count. Each new version of humanity has the promise to finally work out all the kinks, but, more often than not, simply introduces the need to account for new, previously unconsidered, use cases. We have not finished our development lifecycle so there’s still hope, but those who do not learn from their history, are doomed to flat usability metrics across releases.
Best Bit: “It is commonly understood that most user experience analysts of the time were simply grateful that Henry Ford had not yet been born, arguing that he would have commented: ‘If I had asked users what they wanted, they would have said stronger trees’, and the human race might never have happened at all.”
via linkedin.com
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