Klause,
I find it mildly irritating when people don't check sources and merely comment on the cliched assumptions they hold about other people's work.
For the record, stakeholder engagement in our projects occurs from the beginning. Indeed, we allow about 50% of project effort to deal with this aspect of the work and it runs throughout the many stages of a project and beyond.
We call the commonest testing method we use 'diagnostic testing'. As well as measuring performance and looking for faults in design, it is also open ended so that we can use it to discover new possibilities. Indeed, some of the most creative moments in design can happen in our testing. (and btw our testing involves collecting both quantitative and qualitative data at the same time.)
As to comments made on sample sizes, this is technical issue which is dealt with by us and others as a matter of routine. And a great deal of effort goes into some very careful assesment of the validity, reliability, and sensitivity of our testing methods, in accordance with accepted rigorous methods in this field.
Finally, if you care to look at the details of our published design process and our many case histories, you will find a stage called monitoring. This stage is vital to determining how a design is used once it is in the public domain.
Just as an aside (again from our published research) when we helped the Tax Office develop a new tax form for public use, the final testing was done on the tax paying population of an entire state, approximately 250,000 people. Moreover, routine data and followup was undertaken as part of the monitoring stage in subsequent years. This work was undertaken in between 1983 and 1986. We have subsequently deepend and further refined our monitoring methods in other design projects for other government and industry bodies.
For those of you who prefer evidence to cliched assumptions can I suggest:
SLESS D. & FISHER P. 1990. Improving information management in the insurance industry. Information Design Journal 6: 103-129.
SLESS D. 2004. Designing public documents. Information Design Journal + Document Design Journal 12: 24-35.
Also, if you want to understand something of the range of stakeholder involvement in at least one of our projects, have a look at pages 3 and 4 of the Medicine Labelling code of Practice which we developed in collaboration with many stakeholders and published in 2004. I offer this, not because it is special, but because, like our published work, it is in the public domain.
Please check before you comment.
David
--
blog: http://communication.org.au/blog/
web: http://communication.org.au
Professor David Sless BA MSc FRSA
CEO • Communication Research Institute •
• helping people communicate with people •
Mobile: +61 (0)412 356 795
Phone: +61 (0)3 9005 5903
Skype: davidsless
60 Park Street • Fitzroy North • Melbourne • Australia • 3068
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|