Published 2008-09-24.
Time to read: 1 minutes.
In his keynote presentation to the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto entitled “The Wisdom of Experience”, Alan Cooper had a great sentence that described the ‘first to market’ goal behind some products:
Sure, it is terrific to be first. But the product still has to be good.
Alan also makes some good points about design, engineering and construction. He took the long way around, because he doesn’t get into his main topic, interactive design, until slide 75. Requirements are discussed starting at slide 87. In the slide entitled “Requirements are not design”, Alan says:
- Giving people what they say they desire does not result in success.
- Your customers are not the same as your users.
- Neither your customers nor your users know what they want or even what they do.
- What people tell you has little bearing on the truth.
- Good user experience is not dependent on features
- Radically different products can have identical features.
- A list of features is not the same as the design of behavior.
- Expertise in a subject does not correlate to expertise in designing software behavior.
Philosophy starts on slide 92. I like philosophy, it is one of the foundations of architecture.
