UCLIC Term 1 is almost over – Lessons Learnt

I’ve learnt a lot over term one, but that has also left me with a lot of questions.

Here are some general things that I can recall at the top of my head (it’s been a long week)…

• Bringing practice and academia together isn’t easy and can lead to contrived situations where we have to imagine what it’s like to do things in the corporate world
• There are over 100 usability evaluation methods, and I’m assuming these are mostly from the HCI research community – I don’t think all of them are applied in the working world
• A solid grounding in theory does help a lot in practice, but maybe too much theory isn’t good
• There’s a lot of emphasis on the UK HCI-ergonomics industries, but what about abroad? I believe there’s a sizable community in Asia (Hong Kong, India, etc.), and I don’t feel the impact of the US-based UX industry here in the UK.
• It’s always important to attend practice seminars, where people from industry give talks and students get to engage in exercises that illustrate take away lessons (e.g. perform costing for a project proposal)
• Joining the UPA as a student member and attending their events have been beneficial and insightful for me

Growing pains

Someone once said that the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know – and I think that’s really true. There’s so much stuff to learn and it’s impossible to cover it all within a span of one year. And at the same time, good usability doesn’t come instantly and builds on good practice and experience (and hence experienced usability practioners get paid much more).

I regret not spending enough time to read. It’s one of the things on my priority list for the holidays, and I need to cover at least 10 books back to back, really fast – both for the course and for my usability interest. I put my name down for the London UX bookclub, and I’m hoping to join the inaugural meeting slated for February ’09.

Usability isn’t always = to innovation

Taking stock of my experiences over the last few months, I explicitly remember how Cooper’s “About Face 3” was really the turning point for me. But even before that when I was starting out with BT 3 years ago, there was a lot of hype and talk about innovation (not just in BT, but everywhere).

For some reason, I had considered usability and innovation somewhat synonymous, and I realize it’s not always the case. There have been times where our lecturers made it clear to us that innovation, while commercially beneficial, isn’t always a direct application of HCI or ergonomics.

And I think this is what makes “the industry” look quite chaotic at times, because there are so many people coming at this from so many different places. There’s never ‘one right answer’, and as usability/ux/hci/ergonomics people, we’re always having to say, ‘it depends‘.

And I think that UCLIC has done the right thing to emphasize on the learning process, or something they call “reflection” (which Kevin Cheng also observed about UCLIC about a few years ago, albeit somewhat negatively).

More to come…

I’m not quite done with the term just yet, lest I decide to pack my bags and go for a long holiday. Two papers are due January, and there’s tons to catching up to do. One of the papers involve evaluating usability evaluation methods (yes, evaluation methods that get evaluated) in measuring visitors’ experiences of a Zoo website, which I think will be fun.