Wednesday Wisdom #32: Quality
I’ve noticed an increase recently in people using the word ‘quality’ rather indiscriminately. It can be a filler word, something people use when they actually mean “the way things have always been done”.
Reading Eric Ries The Lean Startup has convinced me that you need to know who your ‘customer’ is when designing products, systems, workflows, and tools. There may be no monetary exchange, but the value proposition needs to be strong.
It’s only then that you can start talking about ‘quality’.
The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.
Image CC BY Laura Dinneen
I agree Doug. Thought this piece by David Wiley also very pertinent http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3845
Thanks Theo! Great post. 🙂
I completely agree. It’s been an eye-opener in my recent work how much we, as ‘experts’, have been deciding what our users need based on not much more than a small amount of anecdotal evidence or a gut feeling. We have to jump through hoops to attempt to gain any useful communication with our users. If we don’t communicate with them how can we understand them.
Thankfully, we are now moving towards having a lot more real time communication with users and are putting in place a system of metrics to help evidence the effectiveness of any changes we make.
The phrase I’ve been using recently is one I stole from somewhere, “If we’ve got data, let’s go with that. If all we’ve got are opinions, let’s go with mine.” 😉
Like it. I’ll steal if from you.