Role of design and usability

Found on Column Two
From OK/Cancel

Tom Chi has written an article that provides an interesting perspective on the role of design and usability in a project. It even has diagrams! To quote:

If our process is too usability heavy, we are not able to explore the space widely enough. The testing prematurely optimizes on a region and we end up doing many design tweaks, but comparatively few significant changes.

If our process is too design heavy, we can zip all around the space, but there's no way to know when to stop. A designer might hit a workable solution and iterate right past it. There is also no way to know which directions to prune, so we use up design time on failing directions, and this can cause our team to optimize too late.

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