First impression with HCI

This is my first post.

I am so glad that most of the classmates in HCI course have realized that User-Centered Design seems to be too ideal, and not practical. The water flow model of the interactive software engineering life cycle illustrates that it is the right way of doing software engineering, and we all know that is true, but is it being applied in the industrial field? The answer is no. I have a friend who knows some guys from Nuance (http://www.t9.com) developed T9 input method, which is the most popular cell phone input method in the world, actually they did not do too much usability testing, the approach model was still developer oriented at that time. many HCI design concepts are not being used as industrial standards nowadays, most of the companies still follow the traditional way, e.g. spec, design, implementation, testing, and integration without too much user interactive involved. What happens if they find that spec is changed or design does not match user's needs when they are in the integration stage? Throw away all the coding and re-design everything? No. Companies and users come to a compromise finally and users will be accustomed with the current outcome.

Jeff, our TA, said that three companies, Microsoft, Apple, and Google did really good at usability engineering. Well, from my point of view, Microsoft is not that good, see what Microsoft has designed, Vista, Internet Explorer, SharePoint, they make software complicated! They usually dump information to users and give us lots of options to choose, it seems to be professional though, users do not want that much. What users care about a peice of software are 1) do I need it; 2) is it easy to use; 3) will it bring any trouble to me. Apple is renowned for its fancy design, but I do not think that they come from users' opinions. Apple has groups of creative people who are crazy for UI designs, their products are always out of our imaginations, and that's why it emerges lots of Apple-Only-Fans. Google is another story similar to Apple as they have got every employee extremely talented. What can a group of talents do? Actually, what can't they do?

However, I do think that user and usability focused software engineering will have its time in the future, as Parmitt, our another TA, has said, "nobody talked about usability engineering 10 years ago, and it is still new today and it is going to change, but change takes time". Agile software development has been accepted and put into practise recently and more and more companies will follow this model to re-define software engineering. 

Keep J's (the professor of HCI course) words at the end: users are not like me.