I had a lot of fun reading this article – it voiced a few misgivings I had about trying to quantify experience. I felt that that Jesse James Garret summed it up nicely, when he said:
It’s a lot easier to defend science than it is to defend opinion, even when that opinion is informed by experience and professional judgment. But what’s going on here is not really science at all — it’s pseudoscience. Dressing our opinions in the trappings of research does not make them scientific.
That’s exactly it! I can’t explain why I like something, even if the design isn’t fantastic, it’s not something you can quantify, and it’s different for every person. No matter how much research or effort you put into trying to figure out what makes it tick, it will not certainly yield 100% user satisfaction – You can’t =make= someone love your product, they just will.
That aside, I don’t think it’s irrelevant. If anything, it made me think more about what the user thinks, as a receiver, instead of what I want to publish, by way of information organization. The novelist analogy perfectly conveyed the spirit of the work:
The impact and value of this kind of research is analogous in a way to the work a novelist does when researching her characters, historical events, and locations in preparation for their novel. The research is important, it helps the novelist create a stronger and deeper world — but ultimately the novelist’s real work is when she makes stuff up from her own imagination.
It’s precisely how, with research, you can provie the platform for which all this is built upon, but it’s the users which use their imagination to create their experience. Just like novelists, not all types of work produced finds resonance within the person experiencing the work – A book may be fantastic, but not everyone loves it. It is, after all, subjective.
This is particularly poignant when Zeldman brings up the point:
A user can miss everything you put in his path, and call you on it, and the user is never wrong, even if there is nothing more you could have done to help him understand. The user is never wrong because experience is experience, not fact.
I love Zeldman. I feel what he says – not just in this article, but in his ezine and books as well – fills… a huge design hole. Often we are so focused on what is technically correct, judging things from the objective point of view (This, I feel, is a fault of the industrial revolution, where we are constantly trying to find technical quick-fixes to what may actually be social/people problems) that we lose the point of having the product – for people to use!
