Thinking (again) about Quality vs. Quantity
Quality vs. quantity is a long lasting dilemma in social sciences and obviously (for me) also in UX.
I grow up in a house of quantity were statistical outcomes are facts and everything else just has not been tested yet… Only as an undergrad student I discovered the rich world of quality research. Last week I read Whitney Hess article (Process, Not Portfolio) about the importance of process in UX, especially in selling UX actually, a great article that captures a lot about the difficulties of a UX portfolio. A day later I read Justin Tauber on UX: An art in search of a methodology. First time I read Tauber, it seems as if he is still thinking about these issues, I feel this article is still waiting for closer but still worth reading.
These two articles are dealing with different issues, but in a way they argue in opposite directions.
I agree with Hess, the process will tell you a lot more about a UX professional than images, but then I agree with Tauber, UX is at least partially about intuition and no process can truly describe it. So I’m easy to convince, not an issue. Well I think it is more than that. UX designers are looking for a definition, for a distinction from other fields; this is going on since I started my work as a designer. It is a struggle. Many times I ask myself why is it so difficult? there is more than one answer, sure, but the different perspectives in these two posts let us pick in the essence of this difficulty.
The final product, which for many people is an image, can’t really tell the story, is it “good” for the users? But neither can the process description, because for many designers outside the Academia, the process is dotted with leaps of intuition (and I say it although I’m a process maniac myself).
And then there is this post from Google, a late answer to Douglas Bowman argument regarding Google’s tendency to make design decisions based on statistics. Is this THE process Hess is talking about? And where is intuition. Are these people all UX designer, or maybe a few variations that can be (and should be?) distinguished. Not sure.
I hope I’ll have a Part 2 for this post.
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