"There are more important things in life than what important measure
-- even for the success and profitability of a company.
Yet all the studies I have seen hue to the way economists define the
issue. That is why I don't economists with the literature in this topic.
i find it disgusting". D Norman
Within the field of economy, one of the most provocative critiques to the way contemporary economy defines and measures "productivity" (not necessarily related to usability, but perhaps relevant to this discussion) comes from Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre N.McCloskey, both highly praised academics in the field.
They argue that the measures of statistical significance that most scientists currently use to measure productivity are actually a qualitative, philosophical rule currently standing for what should be (in their view) a quantitative determination informed by scientific "magnitude". In their view, ontology, the old philosophical question of whether or not things exist, has been replaced by a size matters/how much logic.. To put it shortly - Assumption 1: yes, things exist, therefore, screw ontology; Assumption 2: the existence of things is made clearer through the act of measuring.
The systematic practise of this misassumption happens through an extensive and biased overuse of standard deviation measures, applied to several areas of life, measuring productivity one of the areas; the result, they state, is costing us 'jobs, justice and our lives' (Ziliak & McCloskey, 2008).
What is riveting about their argument is not the replacement of a quantitative approach by a qualitative one but the idea that what we are taking as a quantitative judgment (statistical significance) isn't actually one to start with. Being an ethnographic researcher (rather than a lab-based one) I often wonder what would happen if this critique of the standard deviation was extended to usability testing as we know it at present. Perhaps nothing...as in other areas of life, people would choose to ignore it. In fact they do, every single day, as business people who may know little of academic thinking or academics with varied understandings of the business world. Maybe it's one of those classic cases where it's not the individuals, or the economy, but the culture (what am I saying??).
My 50 cents. And please don't calculate the standard error on that.
Cheers,
Pedro
PhD Anthropologist, Psychologist, Independent Ethnographic Consultant(and I can dance too)
On Wednesday, July 23, 2014 2:50 PM, Don Norman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
There are many serious studies of the relationship between usability and
productivity, as well as the related question of usability versus ROI.
I believe that companies such as SAP (the modern one, run by real
designers, not the older one, run by engineers) work on these issues. And
of course academics love it.
But I have worked in several consumer electronic companies, to be specific
Apple, HP, and Microsoft. I was a senior executive in the first two and a
consultant for the last.
None of these companies ever worried about productivity in their design
efforts. Apple didn't because it's marketplace was homes and schools (and
design companies). Productivity was not an important factor for these
markers: price and pleasure and ease of use were important. For design
companies, the productivity came from software develops, e.g., Adobe's
suite of tools, but none of the many people I know who worked there studied
productivity.
Productivity is of major concern for large companies. That is why the Bell
Labs and Telephone companies did look at this. Those are the folks who
tried to cut seconds off each task. Consumers don;t give a damn about
seconds.
Note that a secondary reason was the firm belief that simply adding
computers enhanced productivity. The belief is difficult to justify, and in
some cases adding computers makes people less productive, but nonetheless,
that nonetheless also made it unnecessary to design differently.
And today, there is a push against the economists' measures of
productivity as neglecting the important parts of life. I had a friend who
did extensive work on the productivity of call centers, his goal being to
reduce the length of each service call. At one of his talks
I economists asked him where his model included customer satisfaction, and
perhaps return purchases by the complaining c customer instead of a
decision never to buy that company's product again. Not only did he not
understand the question, he stopped talking to me for awhile.
There are more important things in life than what important measure
-- even for the success and profitability of a company.
Yet all the studies I have seen hue to the way economists define the
issue. That is why I don't economists with the literature in this topic.
i find it disgusting.
Don
On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 11:33 AM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Thanks for your reply. I appreciate the breadth of information in the
> general area already available hence my specific question. Perhaps I didn't
> ask it as clearly as I might have.
>
Don Norman
Director, DesignLab, UC San Diego: Think Observe Make
[log in to unmask] www.jnd.org <http://www.jnd.org>
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