Re: UCD and Innovation

Well, I wished I'd looked at Anthony's link before I let rip (and generally watched what
I was typing a little more).  Still, it seeded some useful discussions, even though IDEO had
redesigned a physical shopping cart rather than a virtual one.  Do take note if you ever
talk about IDEO's work here!

William Hudson wrote
> >- The shopping basket metaphor allows more visual clues than the mail
> >order domain (the shopping basket and checkout/cash register)
> >- A "virtual store" (with shopping basket) offers a more immediate
> >experience. Many mail order customers would be accustomed to
> > posting an order and then waiting weeks for delivery.

In response to William, can he name sites where the 'shopping cart' looks like anything other
than a mail order form?

Louise Ferguson wrote:

> That said, mail order - old style or new style - is not and never
> had been  in any sense popular in great swathes of the world.
Point taken, but neither are US Zip codes, or state letters, or Cash on Delivery.
The issue here goes beyond the usual scope of field studies into internationalisation
and localisation, which will introduce further constraints (rightly so) on 'creative' design and
innovation.

> The point of this is that there was never any basis for remote
> shoppingtrust, deriving from existing practices.
Which takes us even further from IDEO's physical shopping cart, and further demonstrates
how creativity and innovation have to take full account of the full context of use.  There's more
to shopping than filling a shopping trolley (to use the proper UK English).

I was also picked up for my slip that ethnographers interview.  Yes, we all know that they shouldn't,
we've been told enough times by them.  The fact is though, that every ethnographer I've talked to
in HCI talks with the people they are observing.  Whether this is or is not an interview isn't something
we should spend too much time one, but there has to be almost no structure and zero intent in the conversation before talking can't be seen as some sort of interview.

The real point here is that HCI is about getting the job done.  It is not about keeping academics
happy, especially the lecturers and professors who 'own' the one true ethnography.  In the 1980s, experimental psychologists brought all their rules and theory testing into
HCI and they slowly had to change their ways.  Ethnographers (usually self-described as such) have
to do the same.  I am no more bound by what ethnographers' lecturers are supposed to have said about
proper observational methods, than I am by the (always different) rigid rules of
statistical inference that postgraduate psychologists get drummed into them.  My interest in HCI is
in being able to select the right methods for the job and not to have cuckoos in the nest from some
academic cult.  I'm not knocking academic research at all here, indeed we don't see enough
rigorous and well grounded work in HCI.

I've had five social researchers work for me now.  None were or are 'ethnographers'.  All of them had
previously  carried out observational studies, often in challenging areas of youth crime, youth subcultures, drugs, developing economies and
gender in developing countries.  They all combine observation with interviews and surveys as the need
arises.  None of them has ever suggested that they stick to observation within a rigid value
framework.  I would have caught everyone of them at interview if they had.

So, useful ethnographers *do* interview, but they get called social researchers and they are far
more useful ;-)  Caveat emptor!

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