Who do We Design For?

The other day somebody summarized a speech by Allan Cooper, where he is asked how to approach interaction design when working with the IT departement (hehehe, just when you thought I got tired of bashing them). He put it like this: IT department creates software for people who are paid to use it; independent/commercial software developers create software for people who pay to use it. A brilliant insight.Definitely explains one aspect of the conflict I have with these people. A guy working for the IT department has radically different value system than someone charging to design a piece of software.That also nicely explains why in-house software regularly looks like crap, with fifty-five large buttons on a form (each in slightly different size), fails after three clicks and never really does what people originally asked for. Of course, “stupid users” don’t have the right to complain: they are paid to use it, after all!As they say, it’s worth as much as you pay for it.One twist is that the organization is paying both the IT guy and the users to use the software, which makes the product worth very much to the organization. Need to think whether this is good or bad, and whether the organization (that is, the management) really perceives this as “value.”So where does that leave open source? Well, most open source developers design software for themselves; scratching one’s own itch, as they call it. Which again explains the frustration so many people have with open source: it is simply not designed for them.