In the jam, Mikael Johnson spoke about social media services and user centric design (UCD) in detail, or actually defended the hypothesis that UCD is not a proper mechanism. Instead of trying to explain that argumentation I’ll take another view on this issue.

During the dialogue a notion of developer-consumer distance was laid out. So, what’s the distance between developers and consumers¹?

In the early days of this social media company, developers were users; they were active in the community, participated in day-to-day activities. They also represented the user population, young, male engineers. However, the service gained popularity, teenage girls started to participate more and more in the activities and finally they went big, worldwide. During this process they started to adapt UCD principles, such as personas and surveys.

I think this is interesting, as this resonates well with my own experiences. In Nokia I was asked to focus on children and parent communication. I’m too old to understand boys and girls in elementary school but too young to understand parents. The first thing I suggested was that they’d let me go out to a local school and talk with real people. I also took a look on the buckets of research done by EU and NGOs. In that case this approach was required to get myself in tune with the task.

However, in other cases, such as doing an add-on that posted our workplace’s lunch menu to a microblogging service, I was one of the users – I knew that this would be a hit and it was. Or, when doing a location sensitive system for sharing emotions and experiences, I could think myself as a user and could design based on ‘hunches’ vs. extensive research.

In EVE online they have adapted an interesting cross-approach for this. EVE online created a player council that helps the core developer team with decision-making.

So, the big thing I got from the presentation was the idea that UCD practices need to be adapted when the developer–consumer distance becomes too big. I.e. Engineers can not design products for teenage boys and girls, but they will manage to do so when they understand the user context and frame better.

1. I could also speak of users or end users, but I prefer consumers.

What I felt nasty is lack of developer tools here. Of course I had both Firebug and Safari 4 developer tools available and they do a good job on desktop. And thus, the code worked fine on the desktop, then I tested it on N97 – still working. But on S60 3.1 – namely N95 and E90, it just crashed. If a read the document right, the Javascript core of these browsers is from early 2007, so in the age of Internet they are rather old.

Thus, I got a bit lost there and started the usual debugging strategies: removing and lines until it started to work. Firstly, I found out that the parser is rather strict on old Nokia devices – my objects had a last comma

o = {

a = ‘a’,

b = ‘b’,

}

which is invalid and thus makes the whole object invalid. So, no comma in the end. The problem for me was, that on desktop browsers it works even with that comma, which makes finding bugs a bit harder. A nice tool here is JSLint, which allows you to check the syntax validity of Javascript code. Otherwise, it’s like hide and seek.