All posts tagged: Richard I Anderson

50 Ans d’Informatique: Se Centrer sur l’Usager

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Il y a 50 ans déjà, je commençais au département d’informatique de l’université de Montréal… Il y a 42 ans, j’écrivais un document préliminaire au projet qui allait financer les activités fondatrices de Logitech. Depuis longtemps à la retraite, j’ai passé à d’autres choses (par exemple, j’ai fait un M.A. en litérature anglaise), mais j’ai toujours gardé l’oeil pour un domaine qui n’est toujours pas enseigné en informatique: la usability et le user-centered design. Je voudrais simplement montrer des exemples, dans cet article et ceux qui suivront, de comment nous devrions, en tant qu’auteurs, designers, développeurs, et membres d’équipes de développement de produits, aller voir comment le vrai monde utilise nos produits, ou les produits des autres, ou travaille dans le domaine d’une application que l’on voudrait qu’elles adoptent. Idée #1: Vous ne savez pas tout, et votre équipe non plus Je me souviens de mon mémoire de maîtrise qui était centré autour d’un logiciel que j’avais écrit pour transformer des textes afin de les envoyer à un appareil de photocomposition. J’avais inventé un langage …

More Thoughts about Creativity and Human-Centered Design

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I wrote last week about Richard I. Anderson‘s class on User-Centered Design and Usability, and more thoughts occurred to me about how I found myself advocating for more user involvement in all phases of design and engineering while in fact I wanted to free my creative spirit. I am retired, and I have happily tried various creative endeavors: writing short stories and poetry, playing the piano, taking photos, sewing, dancing, etc. I remember my best moments in my early days at work were when I could write a piece of code that was, mostly, a beautiful piece of code, or finding my way out of someone else’s spaghetti code… Talking to people – users or others with alternative ideas – was hard, because they were challenging my creation. Of course, that doesn’t work well in product development, but everyone was doing it, from marketers to designers to the facility manager who had chosen the color of the walls. It has gotten worse recently with random commenters on the web. I have stopped altogether looking at …

In Memoriam: Richard I Anderson

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Recently I was showing a usability issue of the institutional kind to a friend, and mentioned I had learned so much about human-centered design from taking Richard I. Anderson’s class, oh some 30 years ago maybe? So I wanted to check on Richard and stumbled upon the announcement of his passing and a memorial at BayCHI, an organization he gave so much of his time and energy. I retired early, and learned about Richard’s sickness and times of homelessness, contributed to “Friends of Richard,” and I think last time I met him at a cafe in Berkeley he was going to shelter at a friend’s house (I learned at the memorial it did happen). There was no reason for me to not believe his story and discovery of the sickness he had been afflicted with, but I was so sorry that he had relied on friends who sent him on a spiraling downfall by having him committed to a mental ward. I read his now deleted blog telling how after he had recovered (thanks to …