Today was day 1 of my trip to the SigCHI 2007 conference in San Jose. This is my first time attending this conference, and so far I've been pleasantly surprised. The conference organizers are doing a good job of balancing Academic, Design, and Business interests at the show.

Usability & Product Development: an Introductory Usability Course for Management

This course had a lot of interesting recommendations / best-practices for introducing Usability in the Product Development process. Since it was a full-day course (of which I only attended half, so I could see some papers) the presenter, John Mead, had a TON of useful slides about best-practices for integrating usability concerns in the product lifecycle.

A few interesting stats:

• 63% of projects exceed cost estimates


• the average project is 189% over budget


• the average project is 222% behind schedule


• the average project has only 61% of specified features


• 50% of the development time and money is spent in user interfacec design and development


• most flaws originate in product definition


• 80% of software costs occur after the release

Top reasons for cancelling projects:

• incomplete user requirements
  
• lack of user involvement

Top reasons for exceeding cost estimates:

• user requests for changes


• overlooked user tasks


• users' lack of understanding of own requirements, etc.

Who Killed Design

wiki This was an interesting roundtable discussion of sorts between Bill Buxton, Terry Winograd, Meg Armstrong, and Bill Moggridge. Bill Buxton was an extremely lively speaker (undeniably the most compelling public speaker of the bunch), and offered many provocative ideas and quotes that will probably stay with me for some time. For example:

• There are no tech companies that have a track record for new product development
• ”The only designers worth studying are the repeat offenders.” (This one is less impressive as a quote, but extremely compelling as an idea… more later…)
• ”Designers suck at understanding themselves.” (and especially the process of design)
• ”The era of the Renaissance Man is dead. But the Renaissance itself has forever changed the process of Design.”

There were many more, but I’ll have to have some time to pull them from my notes…

A few other provocative tid-bits (not sure who said them, but they’re worth recording)…

• Design - moving from an existing circumstance to a preferred one.


• How many designers can recognize that the problem they are addressing has no “solution?” How many of those who can know what to do in that circumstance?


• If you’re interested in sustainability, you want the fur coat and not the Mac.

I also attended some paper sessions on Navigation and Expert/Novice studies (separate talks). Not much to new to report.

More tomorrow…