My Two Years as an Anthropologist on the Photoshop Team | Hacker News Reader

My Two Years as an Anthropologist on the Photoshop Team

medium.com

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This is great and represents, IMHO, the key to building a great UX. I also believe ethnographic methods are the best weapon in a UX expert arsenal. There's little value in evaluating a UI built on wrong assumptions.

I hope this "grows", in Adobe and in other companies. Enough of design being about the latest fad, or deciding what the user "wants"/"needs" based on hunches, or - at the root - building products based on assumptions about "people" without systematically studying them. We have the methodology to really understand users and to leave engineer-driven digital products behind. This is really what design is about; form follows function, and we've been deciding what the "function" is all wrong.

There's some kind of JavaScript mess going on that prevents me from being able to read this article on my iPad. I can read it for a couple seconds until the page loads, then everything but the header and footer disappear.

Amusingly, I gather from the comments here that the article is about UX.

A UC Santa Cruz student wrote her dissertation on the culture of elementary particle physicists by infiltrating the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

She reported that the scientists at SLAC "wear t-shirts and blue jeans".

I don't recall or name or the title but someone at http://anthro.ucsc.edu/ should be able to tell you; if you actually want to read it you should be able to get it through interlibrary loan at your local library.

Rather more seriously, in UCSC's Anthropology of Religion I read a book by an anthropologist who read a UFO cult leader's proud announcement of the specific date upon which aliens would visit the earth to bring peace - save us from nuclear war, etc.

Knowing that a vital peer-reviewed publication was at hand, the anthropologist joined the cult.

I don't recall that book's title or author either but I will post it in an edit or reply if I can dig it up.

Another similar example is Tracy Kidder (a writer, not an anthropologist) being embedded with a team at Data General, resulting in the fantastic book "The Soul of a New Machine". I can't recommend it enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

Still probably the best book on product development ever written. [Disclaimer: I worked at DG for 13 years, albeit a bit later, and knew many of the people in "the book" quite well including Tom West.]

Showstopper, on the development of Windows NT, is also quite good.

I read it a few times and liked it. However, once I read what Philip Greenspun had to say about it in writing about Copeland's Generation X [1], I rethought it, and came to agree with him. I've been unable to re-read Kidder's book since, though I've tried.

He essentially said that Kidder spent a year in the presence of engineers, and at no point came close to understanding what makes them tick, and in contrast Copland seems to have spent a week with some and instantly grasped their essence.

[1] (NOTE: NSFW photo at top of page) http://philip.greenspun.com/writing/reading

Edit: Fixed a grammar problem.

The book was When Prophecy Fails [1] by Leon Festinger who, if memory serves, was one of the pioneers in the theory of cognitive dissonance.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails

I believe you're thinking of "Beamtimes and Lifetimes" - actually, I thoroughly enjoyed that book.

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