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Inventing the Future with Structured Planning
Systems Design Methodology for Software Products
Version 2.1, June 6, 1995
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INTRODUCTION
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In a competitive marketplace good design is an essential part of
corporate strategy, and there is a growing awareness of its importance
within the computer industry today. For example, user-centered design
has always been a core part of product development at Apple which has
recently employed psychologist and usability guru Donald Norman.
Similarly, IBM is trying to recapture its lead in the industry with
innovations like its "Leapfrog" prototype, and by employing design
talents such as Edward Tuft in its Strategic Design Department.
Indeed, almost every major computer hardware and software company today
has an in-house user design group of some sort or another.
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This heightened design focus, however, is primarily on the hardware.
In the software sector design is still in its infancy, a situation not
unlike that faced by depression-era industries as they were just
discovering the power and marketability of industrial design. Although
attention to user interface issues has grown over the last decade,
represented by groups like SIGCHI and the Association for Software
Design, the software industry is still largely driven by what can be
done (focusing on engineering the internals), not what should be done
(focusing on what the users need and want). Meanwhile, design schools
and firms have recently scrambled to add user interface or interaction
design to their capabilities.
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Unfortunately, industrial and graphic designers trained in the
tradition of the Bauhaus are good at responding to user needs, but they
generally don't understand the technology underlying software, and few
have the skills to deal with large, complex open systems. Consequently
their contributions, however grounded in a sound understanding of human
factors, are largely limited to the cosmetics of "look and feel". On
the other hand, those who understand the technology are good at
engineering and implementation but they generally pay little formal
attention to user design requirements. Those rare generalists who have
experience with both user and technical issues typically lack the
methodology to apply their design insights to the product in more than
a piecemeal fashion.
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This document critically scopes the issues faced by today's software
products, then describes a systems design methodology to deal with
those issues. Called "Structured Planning", it provides a way to find,
record, and correlate design insights from many sources, then to map
them into a strategy for problem solving and design synthesis, and
finally to translate them into comprehensive, integrated, systems
design specifications. Serving as a front-end to product design and
engineering procedures, a strategic design methodology based on
Structured Planning could translate a wealth of information about
customers, products, and the industry into a product stream of
innovative and competitive software solutions.
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