Hmm. Jared Spool, at this year’s iA Summit 2008 in Miami (April 10-14), keynoted to start things off. He stood on the premise that UCD may no longer be relevant because its premise is out-dated and there are better ways to work. He goes further to point out that some of the best innovations of late, especially the ever-vexing Apple products as well as the success of Google, Twitter, and Facebook all side-stepped formal UCD, especially research. As a researcher himself, Spool analyzes the characteristics of the companies who put these ’successes’ on the market and suggests a path toward becoming more innovative and presumably more successful.

I don’t buy it, Jared. Neither did a lot of the attendees at the conference according to a variety of blog postings (such as the Digital Design Blog by Avenue A and the various conference postings under the CrowdVine community site). As my colleague, Carolyn Chandler, pointed out the other day, it appears to be vogue now to attack the parent from which your very fame was born. Take care old guard, as you begin to tread some spongy ground.

UCD as dogma is just that: dogma. If applied as dogma by ineffective teams, it doesn’t mean the method itself is dogma. I doubt most sophisticated design teams (those comprised of cross-functional skill sets including visual design, interaction design, user experience research, and both front- and back-end technologists) would look at any methodology and arbitrarily say that step 1 must come before step 2. UCD, like so many other guiding principles out there, is a composite of common sense at the end of the day. Well-ordered, for sure, but common sense nonetheless.

Properly applied methodology results in elegant execution. Properly integrated cross-functions reveal new results and uncommon thought. To call out someone like Jobs as an icon that may be opening an excuse to drop UCD inherently skips a step–a very vital step. It fails to recognize that Steve and others have internalized the best of the common sense found in UCD and they understand the checks and balances of technology… to design… to audience needs. These balances and understandings–when they become internal–don’t melt away. They become more fluid and more skillfully applied to creative thought.

Lock-step marches through dogmatic team exercises are just the by-products of teams who have not yet figured out how to run together. Flashes of brilliance, on the other hand, are not magical and are no excuse to drop valuable process. Your cited middle-ground of tips and tricks as a means toward improving team effectiveness is really just narrating an observation that you as a researcher are able to actually observe. Should you have the benefit of spending a lot more time with Steve Jobs or the next Google inventor–whoever that might be–I suspect your powers of observation will reveal individuals who have internalized a lot of what our industry has spent so many years getting down on paper.

Just like brilliant musicians, some of us will land perfect interfaces by ‘channeling’ them–as a musician might claim–from some higher source. But plenty of other artists toil the hard way… constructing, deconstructing, refining, collaborating, and testing in a process-driven path. You might consider a scale of skilled teams as a better framework for articulating your finding rather than a full swing at the industry that has benefited you so well to this point.