From an October 11 post about a BayCHI event, two interesting insights:
- There are no good user research methods of emergent behavior. Cross this with Rashmi Sinha’s classic on design patterns for social sharing and I’ll bet you could come up with some handy metrics.
- What do we deliver in a world of ever-evolving designs?… contemporary systems seem to live in perpetual beta, that they continually release new features, functionality, and interface designs, and, well, what do we do about that?. It’s not just about “endless beta”, the convention for communicating that things might be evolving (good) or buggy (bad). It’s about the spread of agile methods, where services are designed and developed in smaller chunks. Peter acknowledges that the trend poses a challenge for design firms used to working on big bang redesigns and long-cycle product development. This is true in my experience; it’s hard to hire outside consultants unless they are willing to “go native and work closely with the client across the multiple small iterations of a longer design cycle.