A lot of discussion on the SIGIA list and the CHIWEB lists talk about User Centered design, but there isn't a ton of conversation or literature written about this from the perspective of the Design field. The design industry has seemed to ignore this important philosophical perspective of design - until recently. The latest issue of Loop - the AIGA journal for design education - is focused on User Centered Design with articles on methodolgy and practice from a team at Sapient and an overview of a workshop led by Paul Rothstein, Melissa Niederhelman and Katherine and Michael McCoy at Arizona State University. It is great to see the AIGA tackle this, as many designers are being asked to practice this. For many of us, the tools and techniques for bringing users into our process are not known and are not taught in the design schools (with the exception of a few, like Carnegie Mellon and IIT) although concern for the end audience has always been of primary concern.

To accompany this I thought I would also point the links to the Usability Toolkit site. This site has all sorts of tools, checklists and other how-to's for practicing user centered design. It is a very practical site and has come in handy for my team. Most recently they have posted information for making a Paper prototyping kit.

Comments

Folks looking for usability toolkits might also want to check out the one at STC's Usability SIG's site. See http://www.stcsig.org/usability/ for the framed experience, or go to http://www.stcsig.org/usability/resources/toolkit/toolkit.html to get right to it.