I must meditate on this quotation by Jared Spool today...
Link: InfoDesign: Understanding by Design | Special on Jared Spool.
"We ignore the evidence that, in the last 10 years, there has been no
discernable relationship between corporate investment in user-centered
design practices and the regular production of usable products from
those corporations. The companies that spend the most on UCD, such as
Microsoft and IBM, are notorious for regularly producing unusable
products, while companies that are wowing us, such as Amazon, Dell and
eBay have very small UCD investments. To put things in perspective,
Microsoft has more than 120 UCD professionals on staff, IBM has more
than 200, Amazon has five and Dell has two, last we checked. One of
Amazon's UCD people just went on maternity leave, so they are actually
running at 20% less than normal for now."
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