Re: UCD and Innovation

Indeed Anthony, I thought the same.  Bad design rescue yes, innovation, no.

> This illustrates exactly what I'm talking about. I don't disagree
> with anything in the above statement, but I would argue that the
> IDEO shopping cart is a superlative example of incramental change.
> Not a leap in thinking. It's still a shopping cart, but better.
> (See the cart here >> http://www.ideo.com/portfolio/re.asp?x=50029 )
>
> A leap in thinking would be to do away with a cart altogether and
> just provide people with a barcode scanner (or device providing
> that functionality with proper feedback mechanisms) which would
> automatically send a final list of items to be collected when you
> left the store and debit your bank card... (fruit and veg might be
> an exception).

Also, given that mail order worked well for 1.5 centuries with some thing called an order form,
one wonders where all this shopping cart nonsense came from in the first place.

If e-commerce designers had gone down the order form route, how many issues associated with
shopping carts would have been avoided?  Would ethnographers interviewed mail order customers
rather than supermarket shoppers?

As for getting out of the box, what about those red dots in art galleries - how well would they work
on a B2C site?  Just stick a red dot on whatever you want to buy and get a summary at any time
of all your red dots?  Amazon don't have a patent on that yet!  One dot shopping - remember where
you heard it first ...

The role of ethnography/observation in UCD is to look for aspects of context that must remain
undisturbed (or at least unadversely disturbed) when a new design is introduced.  Coming up
with the design ideas that make change worthwhile needs other, non-descriptive techniques.
The whole point of design is to build a better mouse trap.  Design must deliver value and it cannot
do this by merely replicating existing behaviours and performances.

Gilbert

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