Stop thinking like a technician
Think like a user. That’s the basis of any good approach to usability.
The trouble is that it has become meaningless. It is easy to say I am considering user experience, but how do I hold myself to the standard?
I actively try not to think like a technician. I try to remove from my brain the knowledge of how web sites and applications are made. When I jump too quickly from problem to technical solution, I am grasping at what is easiest to implement, not what would be best for the user. Sometimes I have to ask, simpler for whom?
Technical knowledge can be a burden. It can cause one to see a problem from the wrong direction. Having a non-technician plan user experience is sometimes a perfect fix. If he doesn’t know the guts of how hard a perfect solution is, he isn’t tempted to tweak the user experience in the name of easy coding.
On the other hand, the non-technician might hand a web developer something unnecessarily difficult or impossible. It’s not his fault, because he doesn’t know a database or Javascript or whatever works that way. I think that is a pretty good trade-off.
Like the incrementalist and completionist, the non-technician and technician can work together to make something great. And if you’re patient and focused, you can even play both roles.
Beginner’s mind, grasshopper.
[…] My dad is a technician. With a degree in mechanical engineering, he knows his nuts and bolts. So, he devised a puzzle that fooled fellow technicians, but was solvable by those blissfully ignorant of his mechanical ways. The solution required someone to not think like a technician. […]
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[…] Some might call this thinking outside the box. I’d say it’s a darn fine example of not thinking like a technician. But I think it goes beyond that, to say a lot about humans’ innate ability to let go of constraints and be passively creative (much different than brainstorming on a whiteboard and voting on the “best” ideas later). […]
[…] Just try not to think like a technician (or a member of the elite). […]