Teaching Design to Business People
One of my pet rants is that good design matter, even for training materials. Well designed tools don’t just delight the eye they function better, adding efficiency to their purpose. The problem, however, is that design is often taken as extraneous and unnecessary by development managers, instructional designers and other business people who see it as “eye candy.”
Psychologist and author Donald Norman has a post on this issue and attempts to remedy the situation at Northwestern University:
Terry Winograd of Stanford’s computer science department and d.school wrote a very nice description of our new Design + Operations MMM program at the Kellogg School of Business and Northwestern Engineering. That article is available in Interactions, the magazine for Human Computer Interaction professionals.
In Winograd’s words:
The essence of successful interactive products is not just the interaction an end user has with the product, but with the whole range of operations that make that interaction work.
Norman goes on to say that Jimmy Guterman at O’Reilly Radar Group reviews the program in a post titled “Teaching Design to Business People.” A copy of the Winograd article in PDF format can be gotten here: p44-winograd.