Bens scratch pad.

Are we just over complicating what we do or is this for real?

Gosh, you know I was working with a Business Analyst today, who was helping me model our processes for how we implement human factors work into the development life cycle within my organisation. (Australian Government)

I though, "yeah sure, this should only take about 1 hour or so ... surely!"

so, 3 hours later, we've gone through the high level tasks and outputs of the initial planning / synthesis phase of an application development projects lifecycle.

I've covered off level one and two lo fidelity prototyping, hi fidelity prototyping, electronic test mule development for User testing, performance metrics, decision making models, risk evaluation models, treatment plan development, asset creation and management, site visits, card sorts, screen specifications, wireframes, style specifications, interaction models, patterns and pattern management techniques, hell the list just goes on and on and on and on and on and ... you get the idea.

Tomorrow we're going over the execute phase, and what tasks are involved there. Another long conversation with much posturing and pointing at documentation, spread sheets, and hand drawn sketches I expect.

So I gets to the end of a long winded email to a person who struck me as someone to keep an eye on in the future (see inspiration). And I started thinking....

" you know, I've been doing this for 10 years or so now, in government and private, and government again. And does it all boil down to the 4-5 pages of scribbles of A3? NO!!! I could have rabbitted on for another 3 hours or more if it were feasible to do so."

"so if I can rubbish on about the intricacies of user centred design practices to this BA, and actually have it make sense, there must be heaps to this"

"if that is so, am I over complicating the issue? Can't we just make screens look pretty? Don't we just make graphics and pretty coloured text and buttons? Doesn't all the hard work get done by the technology developers?"

Nah.

Its complicated. Its fiddly. Its involved and emotionally taxing.

I love it. its a hoot.

ciao colleagues.