BCCS & Products

September 20, 2001 at 1 pm · Filed under Usability/User Research

I always enjoy reading Don Norman — he’s usually just grumpy enough to make his insights and arguments bite a bit harder. This time he’s taking to task the Behavior, Cognitive, and Social Sciences (BCSS) academic departments for poorly training students to efficiently function in industry (though, admittedly, most academics probably don’t care about this too much). He points out that there are plenty of analytical techniques, but few for synthesis or design; for the few we do have, there’s no system set up to train people to apply them.

In academia, we teach how to critique: to analyze a published study and find the flaws. We are superb at finding flaws. We are also superb at doing carefully controlled studies that minimize biases of all sorts, that are able to detect subtle differences. Problem is, these studies take months to perform, and they are designed for subtleties. Individual creativity is valued, and the reward system encourages publications, with concern about the order in which a person’s name is listed as author.

In industry, we need to provide products that offer value to consumers. Speed and cost are critical parameters. Competition with other companies is intense. On the whole, the subtleties that interest academics are of little interest to consumers: if you like, they are beneath the threshold of perception. Group work is encouraged. Criticism is frowned upon. Publication isn’t relevant: shipping a product is. Thee is little time for writing – each product is a rush job, and when it is nearing completion, well, the next ones are already underway.

Evidence of what JND says: 1. there really aren’t any academic programs (yet) that are widely acclaimed for putting out great interaction designers, and (less-directly) 2. the richness of the (informal) user-experience community interacting over the internet seems to have derived partially as compensation for this lack of effective formal training. It would be interesting to hear from people in other disciplines, see if there are any cross-disciplinary correlations.

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