back to common sense

matt jones on process:

I've definitely seen process become dogma in a number of workplaces, particularly around user-centred design.

Theory: because it's actually common-sense.

Two points on common-sense from my experience:

1. It's very hard to tell people there's no common sense in what they are doing if you come into an organisation or team. Even harder perhaps if you are trying to sell it into a company from the outside.

2. It's very hard to keep the common sense in a team that has it, when it will be assailed from all sides by nonsense. Which, of course, might seem like common sense (and might well be) from the other party's point-of-view.

worse is people who have no common sense, then you get asked to develop a process for those people who won't follow it correctly, if at all, because . . . they have no common sense!

jones says that strict adherence to a process causes people to lose confidence in their own decisions. they won't look to their experiences, intuition and common sense because the process tells them their decisions need to be based on steps x, y,z. he uses user-centered design methodologies as his example:

I've seen entire teams hooked on user-tests, unable to take a decision until they get the word back from the beyond the two-way mirror. Designers' and producers' confidence in their own experience gets dented. Diminishing returns on usability testing, compared to project hold-ups. Personas from past projects stalk them like the usability undead. The work becomes no fun, the common sense is gone. Projects pall, or worse, stall.

he concludes that processes such as user-centered design methodologies are good as long as you have leadership that can help steer staff to use their own common sense with the processes.