Porter Anderson, "Scott Adams: Dilbert's Ultimate Cubicle," CNN.com, 28 Aug 2001

"They've got this whole design process that starts with this incredible, chaotic brainstorming session where anything goes and nothing's criticized -- and at that stage, you're pretty sure nothing good can ever come out of this.

"Then you find out that they've done this before. And they actually do throw away the bad ideas. They do a rapid prototype and start building stuff."

Jay Conrad Levinson, "What do people want online? It's not what you think it is," CAP Online, April 2001

Some folks see the web as a vast, new field for advertising messages, assuming that while people may want to do something else, if we can entice them with Flash, we can sort of trick them into paying attention to our products and services. Guess what. That's not gonna happen.

What does this mean to emarketers? It means that if you're constructing a site for goal-oriented consumers, you'd better make sure you can help facilitate their seeking. Rather than focus on entertainment, Flash, and useless splash screens, the most effective sites are those that help people get the information they want when they need it. Straightforward data, information that invites comparison, and straight talk are going to win the day.

Charles L. Mauro, "Is a high priced usability 'Guru' a good investment?" TaskZ.com, 6 Aug 2001

When taken in this context, even the best usability Guru is unlikely to have a suitable understanding of your customer profile and their critical cognitive structures, such as prior learning, experience with other software, and motivation. Therefore, even though usability Gurus may have the best intentions in their criticisms, there is absolutely no guarantee that their recommendations will improve customer acquisition, retention, or migration. Granted, some design flaws are so obvious that they deserve a bit of rant and rave; but such reviews should always leave the motivation of the development team intact. It should never be a humiliating experience in front of the boss and the boss's boss. Want to kill UCD for the current generation of web development teams? Make them think that everything they did was stupid and wasteful.

Lewis Samuels, "Designing for Usability on a Shoestring," WebReview.com, 3 Aug 2001: The goals of the user are relevant because, again, it's the users who will determine the eventual success or failure of any site. This fact is worth repeating because it's frequently forgotten when defining navigation, functionality, and visual design. In my experience, Web professionals often lose sight of the end user, focusing instead on the opinions of their clients, coworkers, or worse yet, themselves. This is a natural reaction, but a very dangerous one. If it's the client that signs the checks, it's only natural to want to please them. However, the savvy designer will keep in mind that the client often knows nothing about the user and their needs.

Michael Kanellos, "The elements of style," CNET.com, 16 Jul 2001

How does the focus-group testing work. When do you start marrying your ideas with the average person's behavior?

We are mostly interested in where are people using these things, what are the tasks they are trying to accomplish, what are their key frustrations, how much space do they have.

A good example of that is the ThinkLight. That whole idea came out between collaboration between human-factors engineering, industrial designers and marketing. We were trying to figure out what user benefit we could link to our product. It was along the lines of making a better dashboard rather than a better engine.

One of the things we came up with was that often people were trying to use these things in places you wouldn't ordinarily think of, in a dark lecture hall, or maybe in the back seat of a car on a trip in the middle of the night, and you are trying to write a report. Everybody talked about, "Well, you can tilt the screen down and light your keyboard and lift it back up again." But then we thought, "Wouldn't it be great if there was a light that would illuminate the keyboard?"

HannaHodge User Experience Architects 1 It is with both sadness and great pride that I must inform you of the end of an era for us at HannaHodge. As of July 2001 we will cease operations. We have used two measures to inform our decision. In March we got the same word from Argus Associates. What is making what appear to be successful user experience and information architecture firms fail? There are enough sites with problems that there should be plenty of work.

Design for Process, Not Products If users feel pushed through a process or can't figure out what to do next, you're skipping steps that matter to them. Don't design Webpages. Design support for users' tasks.

Dear World: Loose Lips Sink More Than Ships Ms. Turkle of M.I.T. says that many Americans equate e-mail with paper mail, which enjoys strong legal, and social, protections against snooping. Even though they know e- mail might not be secure, she said, many people think of it as being like talking with friends in a bar. "You're surrounded by other people but you don't experience those other people as having a microphone at your table," she said. Ms. Turkle also notes that sending and receiving e-mail are very different experiences. Composition occurs in a zone of intimacy, which leads people to write things they might not otherwise risk broadcasting to the world. "The act of composing e-mail occurs within your private mindspace," she said. "The only place where people are quiet and not being bombarded is in front of the machine." But the recipient is often in a completely different state of mind. "A hundred messages come up; the experience of receiving this thing is that you are being bombarded," Ms. Turkle said. This breeds an attitude that no e-mail should be taken too seriously. Instead, the harried recipient thinks, "Oh, cool, I'll pass this on," and with a mouse click sends a piece of correspondence around the world, like a computer virus.

HBS Working Knowledge: Special Reports: Scott Cook: The Power of Paradigms What is clear, Cook said, is that the fundamental activity underlying paradigm shifts is directly related to the practice of good business in general. "That means getting the decision makers close to the customer," he said. "That's one of the distinguishing characteristics of HBS, in fact—to drive research and teaching close to practice, close to executives in their day-to-day lives." "The customer is the compass; that's where the learning comes from," Cook concluded. "And don't forget to truly respect surprises."

HBS Working Knowledge: Special Reports: Scott Cook: The Power of Paradigms "The biggest business innovations are not technology-based. Major breakthroughs come through a unique mindset or paradigm," said Cook (HBS MBA '76), citing eBay's revolutionary e-commerce model as an example. "There was no inventory, no guarantee that merchandise was authentic, and no easy way to pay for or receive goods—it might take a customer one week to buy a $10 item, and another two to three weeks to receive it," he remarked. "Needless to say, retailers and venture capitalists ignored him, thinking he was either irrelevant or crazy." When Benchmark Capital finally took a chance on the new auction site, eBay's IPO and subsequent stock movement rewarded the investment company with the single largest gain in the history of venture capital. The technology supporting the eBay Web site took its founder, Pierre Omidyar, less than a week to build, Cook continued. "What was significant was the power of this new paradigm or mindset," he said. "People who shift paradigms have the same facts as everyone else, but they see them differently. The end result either revolutionizes the customer experience, or the economics of the business, or both, as was the case with eBay."