Today I attended the first half of the "Human Centred Design Revolution Workshop" which showcased the talents of Jesse James Garrett.
For the benefit of others who may be interested, what follows is a brief summary of what he said.
Basically Garrett gave a walk through of his theories around user-centred design. Garrett has been on this track for a while now and a lot of what he said reinforced the ideas in his book, The Elements of User-Centred Design.
Garrett went to great pains to point out that this is not a 'theory' in that it provides answers, or guidelines or even pointers. It's a way of thinking that he believes need to infiltrate the whole development team in order for websites to address user needs well and thus produce a website that is a success, whatever the metrics you have applied to its measurement.
Garrett divides the development of a website into five planes three of which are then each divided into two sections - the web as software and the web as hypertext system. These two distinctions define the unique position of the web in terms of its cousins, software development and media. The web sits somewhere in between. People use it to consume media but they also interact with it and try to achieve tasks, like they do with software. Development then has to take these two things into account.
The five planes move from the conception stage where things are more abstract, to launch where things are definitely more concrete (if they're not you're in trouble!).
The planes are (moving from abstract to concrete):
- User needs / Site objectives- Functional specifications / Content requirements- Interaction design / Information architecture- Interface & navigation design/ Information design- Visual design
Having read his book and sat through the workshop I can conclude that the techniques used by Web Services at least, are user centred and we are on the right track. In further posts I hope to explore the ideas that came from this workshop in terms of how we can improve the way in which we do things at the Uni. If you want to explore Garrett's work further, I have the PowerPoint handouts from today's workshop, plus a print of his one-pager 'Elements of User Experience. The book is available in the University library and Garrett's website provides more information, of course.
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