34,79 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
A foundational yet practical approach to UX that delivers more creative, collaborative, holistic, and mature design solutions, regardless of your background or experience
About This Book
- Improve your UX design awareness and skills
- Gain greater confidence to know when you have delivered a “good” UX design
- Learn by example using a book designed by a UX mind for a UX mind
Who This Book Is For
This book is written for the beginner as well as the experienced UX practitioner, regardless of team size, company size, or job title. It is also intended for anyone with an interest in UX, engages with UX, is involved in any way in interactive problem solving and design, or simply wants to learn more about what we do, how we do it, and why those in the UX field are so passionate about wanting to do it better.
What You Will Learn
- Awaken your UX mind and dispel the myths of non-UX thinkers
- Create the six optimal conditions for your best ideas to appear
- Identify and incorporate the ten design principles found in all good UX design
- Develop a broader understanding of Information Architecture (IA) to better engage, guide, and inform
- Develop a fundamental understanding of patterns and the properties that create them
- Raise your level of UX maturity with a strategy that transforms your approach to problem solving and helps others understand the true value of your work
- Utilize important tools of the UX trade that never go out of style
- Increase your knowledge of UX, incorporate valuable ideas and insights into your work, and look at design from a very unique perspective
In Detail
Written in an easy-to-read style, this book provides real-world examples, a historical perspective, and a holistic approach to design that will ground you in the fundamental essentials of interactive design, allow you to make more informed design decisions, and increase your understanding of UX in order to reach the highest levels of UX maturity. As you will see, UX is more than just delighting customers and users. It is also about thinking like a UX practitioner, making time for creativity, recognizing good design when you see it, understanding Information Architecture as more than just organizing and labeling websites, using design patterns to influence user behavior and decision making, approaching UX from a business perspective, transforming your client's and company's fundamental understanding of UX and its true value, and so much more.
This book is an invaluable resource of knowledge, perspective, and inspiration for those seeking to become better UX designers, increase their confidence, become more mature design leaders, and deliver solutions that provide measurable value to stakeholders, customers, and users regardless of project type, size, and delivery method.
Style and approach
An in-depth, easy to read, and entertaining journey into and through the world of UX using real-world examples, thoughtful illustrations, and engaging quotes to inspire and explain fully the how and why of UX in a practical and impactful way and used immediately in your own work.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 286
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Practical UX Design
Practical UX Design
Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: April 2016
Production reference: 1220416
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
35 Livery Street
Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78588-089-6
www.packtpub.com
Credits
Author
Scott Faranello
Reviewer
Peter Spannagle
Commissioning Editor
Dipika Gaonkar
Acquisition Editor
Subho Gupta
Content Development Editor
Arshiya Ayaz Umer
Technical Editor
Pranjali Mistry
Copy Editor
Karuna Narayanan
Project Coordinator
Kinjal Bari
Proofreader
Safis Editing
Indexer
Rekha Nair
Graphics
Kirk D'Penha
Production Coordinator
Melwyn Dsa
Cover Work
Melwyn Dsa
About the Author
Scott Faranello has been a dedicated and passionate UX professional for well more than a decade now, working with many companies in very diverse organizational cultures. His experience includes intensive customer, user, and business research, conceptual wireframes, designing information architecture, conducting user and usability tests, measuring the ROI of usability, creating visual design, and staying abreast of the current UX technology trends. Scott is also the author of Balsamiq Wireframes Quickstart Guide (2012) and Practical UX Design (2016), Packt Publishing.
I absolutely could not have written this book without the love, support, and encouragement of my wife Melanie, who got me unstuck when I needed it and who reminded me that the chapters were good enough, or else I'd still be writing Chapter 1. I want to acknowledge my two beautiful boys, who in the past year never saw dad without the laptop—you both are the reason I've accomplished anything at all. I'd also like to thank the fine folks at Packt Publishing, including Subho Gupta, Pranjali Mistry, and of course, Arshiya Ayaz Umer, whose patience never ran out, even when it should have. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to write for you once again and for believing and trusting in me throughout. I'd like to thank my friend Jennifer Fabrizi, who was kind enough to read some of my work when it was still in the larval stage. Thanks to Rob Edge for giving me a much-needed break from thinking about UX one night a week. Thanks to James Wachira because how could I not thank you? Thanks to Greg Renoff, the author of Van Halen Rising, who was kind enough to thank me in his book, so I am returning the favor. Thank to Starbucks, Whole Foods, and Panera Bread for allowing me to sit for hours, even during lunch time, as I wrote and rewrote these chapters while consuming most of their coffee. Lastly, I'd like to thank you for buying this book and for taking the time to read what has been the top priority of my life for the past year.
I am grateful. Thank you.
About the Reviewer
Peter Spannagle is a UX design leader and strategist who lives in San Francisco. His background includes working with mobile, agency, start-ups and enterprise. He helps companies define and launch digital products by working with business stakeholders to establish objectives, engaging with end users to capture insights and user needs, leading rounds of concept design and validation, directing creative and technical teams to execute a design vision using iterative and collaborative methods. He is the coauthor of WordPress and Flash 10.x Cookbook, Packt Publishing, 2010.
www.PacktPub.com
eBooks, discount offers, and more
Did you know that Packt offers eBook versions of every book published, with PDF and ePub files available? You can upgrade to the eBook version at www.PacktPub.com and as a print book customer, you are entitled to a discount on the eBook copy. Get in touch with us at <[email protected]> for more details.
At www.PacktPub.com, you can also read a collection of free technical articles, sign up for a range of free newsletters and receive exclusive discounts and offers on Packt books and eBooks.
https://www2.packtpub.com/books/subscription/packtlib
Do you need instant solutions to your IT questions? PacktLib is Packt's online digital book library. Here, you can search, access, and read Packt's entire library of books.
Why subscribe?
To Mel and the boys. My miracles.
Preface
"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
--Henry David ThoreauIt's an exciting time for User Experience (UX). Never before has UX been so much at the forefront of technology and so sought after by companies around the world. It's truly a great time to be a UX practitioner. It has also taken a long time to reach this place. UX has been working hard for years to make an impact on becoming an integral and valued member of the technology team, proving its value and providing organizations with problem-solving techniques and design solutions that promise greater returns on investment (ROI) and happier customers and users. Nevertheless, while UX appears to be highly sought after, garnering high salaries in many areas and seemingly plentiful job opportunities appearing almost daily, there is another story taking place that is not as rosy.
Although UX is more prevalent in business circles, it is still highly misunderstood. A gap exists between how UX sees itself and what stakeholders and executive understand of it. To those at the top as well as managers, stakeholders, project managers, and so on, UX practitioners are thought of as those folks who perform usability studies and wireframes, usually after business requirements have been completed and the development team is about to launch a product. The rest of the time, UX teams can sit idle, waiting to be asked on a project while watching user-facing products continue being released for the public without their help.
Even as calls to customer support increase as revenue from poor design decisions goes down, UX still has trouble proving its value. With the current pace of technology and the competitive nature of interactive designs, it is more important than ever for companies to keep pace and meet the expectations of their customers/users. UX is much more than usability studies and wireframes.
UX is a mindset that requires a deep understanding, strategy, and approach toward design that when aligned to business goals has the potential to go straight to the top, grabbing the attention of those who matter most: those who pay us to deliver results. When the opportunity of writing this book came to me, I was, of course, very excited and also quite challenged. While it's important to share the techniques and skills that UX practitioners need in order to improve their design work, it was also important to focus on UX from a more holistic perspective to understand and explain how it is connected and related to the larger world of design, creativity, and the human experience.
To accomplish this in a book, I provided material that speaks not only to new UX practitioners, but also to anyone at any level, be they technology or business-focused learners and those in the UX field those who want to understand what UX is, what UX does, and how UX can truly provide real, measurable business value business stakeholders find impossible to ignore. You will also find no geekspeak in these pages. Anytime a technical term is introduced, a clear explanation follows. UX is about reaching large audiences with design, and writing about it should be no different. In addition, when we talk only to those in the UX field, we do our profession and ourselves a disservice. UX is about access, ease of use, and engagement. Unless our coworkers understand UX clearly, we cannot expect to deliver clarity to our end users. This is what Practical UX sets out to accomplish.
UX is not going away anytime soon, but if we fail to engage, educate, and prove our value on a consistent and visible basis to our entire audience—customers, users, and business stakeholders—we risk losing our audience for good. Good UX design is more than just look and feel and the most effective place on the screen to put a submit button. Those things are important, but good UX is more importantly about the mindset, creativity, and recognizing that our true value lies in how we think and how we approach our work. We will begin with the mindset of UX and what it means to truly listen to customers/users. We will then move on to creativity and how to identify a truly good design using examples from the Web, mobile, and areas of design that at first may seem far outside the realm of UX, but upon closer inspection are actually inseparable from it. Following that, we will look at how to effectively drive customers, users, and stakeholders to where we want them to go in terms of information architecture, pattern usage, and a strategy that provides stakeholders and business leaders with results that are impossible to ignore. Lastly, we will look at some of the tools of the UX trade as well as resources to expand your learning long after our time together here.
Practical UX is a big subject that will take you down many interesting and hopefully new paths of learning in order to take your design skills and UX knowledge to the highest level of maturity.
Thank you for taking this journey with me. Now, let's begin.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, The User Experience Mindset, looks at some persistent myths about design and customer/user engagement that can make a profession like UX non-existent. Dispelling these myths is the first step, and an important one, for acquiring a UX mindset—the first step of good design.
Chapter 2, Creative UX, looks at how to create six optimal conditions for your best ideas to appear. This will require two modes of thinking, open and closed. Once you acquire the skill to control both of these mindsets creativity and good design will soon follow.
Chapter 3, Good UX Design, identifies ten design principles found in all good UX design, how to identify it and how to recognize it is more than just web design. Good design has no boundaries and this chapter will explain why.
Chapter 4, Foundations of Good IA, will provide you with a broader understanding of Information Architecture (IA) that will give you a wider view of IA and demonstrate that IA is not found in technology.
Chapter 5, Patterns, Properties, and Principles of a Good UX Design, looks at some fundamental properties of patterns that are found is all of the best designs, from UX to music to painting to architecture. Borrowing from a renowned building architect, you will be introduced to fifteen properties that will change the way you look and think about patterns and how to use them in your design work.
Chapter 6, An Essential Strategy for UX Maturity, discusses the challenges that UX faces if its maturity level does not increase. Doing this effectively and rapidly begins with a strategy that transforms how others, like stakeholders and various other colleagues, understand the true value of UX work.
Chapter 7, UX Tools, hows you the most important tools of the UX trade that never go out of style.
Chapter 8, Final Thoughts and Additional Resources, provides resources for continued learning long after you have finished reading this book.
What you need for this book
No software is needed for this book.
Who this book is for
This book is intended for UX practitioner/designers and anyone who is engaged in designing UX for end users, where you are looking to go deep and become fully engaged with your surroundings, team, end users, and your organization. This is also a book for those who are not yet enlightened about the value of UX, those curious about those who may be curious have never taken the time to investigate what UX is all about, this book is also for teachers of UX, IT, and other disciplines where customers and end users are important. The bottom line is that regardless of who you are or where you come from, this book provides a rich, in-depth, and insightful approach to UX that will help you to become a better UX designer, practitioner, thinker and leader.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "To clarify the issue even further, Apple added a line of text below the app name that says, Offers in-App Purchases to avoid unnecessary and annoying surprises later."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
Reader feedback
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.
To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <[email protected]>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.
If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide at www.packtpub.com/authors.
Customer support
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
Downloading the color images of this book
We also provide you with a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. The color images will help you better understand the changes in the output. You can download this file from http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/PracticalUXDesign_ColorImages.pdf.
Errata
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you could report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded to our website or added to any list of existing errata under the Errata section of that title.
To view the previously submitted errata, go to https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/support and enter the name of the book in the search field. The required information will appear under the Errata section.
Piracy
Piracy of copyrighted material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.
Please contact us at <[email protected]> with a link to the suspected pirated material.
We appreciate your help in protecting our authors and our ability to bring you valuable content.
Questions
If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at <[email protected]>, and we will do our best to address the problem.
Chapter 1. The User Experience Mindset
"Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location."
--Reid HoffmanLet's begin by introducing the first topic that every User Experience (UX) practitioner, and business stakeholder needs to understand about UX: The mindset of UX and what it means to think like a UX practitioner. However, before we do that, let's understand something about UX itself.
UX is a skill. It's a practice. It's about where to place a button on a website and how to organize content. It's about how to improve screen and interface design. It's about wireframes, focus groups, and usability studies. These are the things we know about UX, but what else should we know?
UX is also about collaboration. It's about solving problems and finding solutions. UX is about looking at the world with a unique perspective and a unique mindset. UX is also about focusing on the right people at the right time, including customers, end users and also stakeholders whose business goals and objectives are directly related to UX decisions. As you will see, however, UX is harder to get across than you might think. Good design may seem like a no brainer, but, it is not that simple.
In this chapter we will look at:
Let's begin with a story, a myth if you will, that needs to be dispelled if we expect to deliver better design though UX, better solutions and help those who need our help to understand our true value.
Dispelling the myth of "faster horses"
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
--Henry FordIf you've been in the corporate world or in technology for any length of time, you have probably heard this quote. It implies, albeit subtly, that engaging users in order to find out what they need or want is not important because, hey, what do they know? Seeing this quote and hearing it used for so long, it always seemed odd that Ford would say such a thing. It was also compelling to find out whether he actually did. Not surprisingly, when you do a little digging, you find rather quickly that something is amiss.
The "faster horses" quote is actually relatively new, first appearing around the year 2001 in a letter sent to the UK publication Marketing Week. Additional research by the Henry Ford Museum found that this quote never appeared in any of Ford's own letters and writings. The museum also claimed that while "Mr. Ford wrote numerous articles for a variety of periodicals and newspapers, the quotes attributed to him were varied and often unsubstantiated."—https://www.quora.com/. Hmmm…so if Ford never said it, why does it persist and why is it attributed to a man who was highly innovative, creative, and effective in the solutions he delivered on a global scale?
This quote originated in a marketing publication. The differences between marketing and UX have always been quite diverse. Marketing tends to view customers from an inside-out perspective evidenced by its strong focus on new customer acquisition and customer retention. UX views its customers from the outside in, working closely with them to understand the problems they face and helping to solve them.
Viewed with a marketing mindset, "faster horses" implies that a designer or an inventor, in the case of Henry Ford, knew better than his customers. Looking from the inside-out, "faster horses" implies that we can make assumptions about our customers/users based on data, usage patterns and thinking that if we did ask customers they would not really know what was best for them. The "faster horses" quote also implies that designers can impact a customer's experience based solely on intuition, instincts, experience and business smarts instead of in-depth research and engagement. The "faster horses" quote does one more thing as well: it makes the role of a UX practitioner much harder.
For starters, "faster horses" thinking diminishes the understanding of what UX does and how its solutions rely on understanding customers and end users. It also undercuts the ability of UX practitioners to engage in customer/user facing projects because those with the "faster horses" mindset can just do it themselves and then just pass along their work to the UX folks to test it for any last minute usability and interaction issues. Is it the best solution? Maybe or maybe not, but so long as end users can do the tasks then that is good enough.
"Faster horses" thinking also discounts the level of research and trial and error required to deliver real solutions, not just for customers but for business success as well. As we will see in later chapter, there is much more to problem solving than assuming we know what customers want. "Faster horses" thinking also implies that great design can be done in a vacuum, where anyone with enough experience can design and deliver a customer-/user-based solution without having to engage users face to face. "Faster horses" thinking also allows designers to avoid the discomfort sometimes associated with creativity; something we will look at in the next chapter. The reality is that ignoring our customers/users and thinking we know best can cause many problems, like project failures, over spending, underperforming and lowering user efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction. These can have huge implications and unless the mindset of "faster horses" is changed these problems will continue to grow. While going it alone may paint a romantic image of a lone inventor or experienced team delivering what the world needs and making history doing it, realistically it is impossible to do without deep research, customer/user engagement and empathy for the user and stakeholders as well whose goal it is improve business outcomes in a consistently provable and measurable way. The only true approach, therefore, is one that utilizes a truly authentic UX mindset.
The disservice of "faster horses"
Romanticizing lone wolves: people who seemingly go it alone and solve major problems without the help of others, provides us with great stories and legends, but it also does a disservice to the hard work, skill, collaboration, trial and error, problem-solving skills, and the mindset necessary to make it all happen.
There is actually a lot of evidence to support this. It is most readily seen with the amount of projects that fail every year due to teams inadequately addressing customer/user needs. For example, in a video presentation by Dr. Susan Weinschenk of Human Factors International, titled The ROI of User Experience, Dr. Weinschenk stated that the amount of money spent worldwide on projects related to Information Technology (IT) is estimated at $1 trillion per year. The number of projects abandoned because they are hopelessly inadequate is 15 percent. Refer to http://www.humanfactors.com/project/index.asp for more information on human factors and its importance in project success.
This means $150 billion is wasted each year because teams are not utilizing the right mindset when it matters most, that is, before projects go into development; before requirements are defined; after adequate communication with customers, end users, developers and stakeholders has occurred; and that everyone is in agreement. Dr. Weinschenk also pointed out the problem of office politics, where teams often branch off into silos of ownership. Then, when projects fail to deliver blame is placed elsewhere, further dividing teams that should be working together towards a single, company/business focused goal. Dr. Weinschenk further pointed out that in order to solve this problem, teams need to get out in front of these issues using techniques such as business and user research and data and analytics to determine business and customer related metrics, interviewing subject matter experts (SMEs) , customers and users, usability testing, root-cause analysis, prototyping and wireframing. All these techniques play a major role in establishing a UX mindset because we are no longer thinking as separate teams. We are now thinking as a unit with the right focus on effective outcomes and measurable results.
When facts ruin a good story
Let's pretend for a moment that Henry Ford actually did utter those words about "faster horses." How would this story hold up when we look at the reality of the situation? Were people in 1908 really looking for faster horses? Were they truly oblivious to the real problems that horse-powered transportation created by the turn of the century? Also, if people were really interested in faster horses, where were they going in such a hurry? Doing some research on the subject, one quickly discovers that the truth is often much more interesting and also much different than what we are led to believe.
By 1908, there were hundreds of thousand of horses crowding city streets around the world, and this was not a new problem. In fact, the problems with horses were well-known. For example, by 1894:
"London…had 11,000 cabs, all horse-powered…several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses per day, a total of more than 50,000 horses. In addition, there were countless carts, drays, and wains, all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the rapidly growing population of what was then the largest city in the world. Similar figures could be produced for any great city of the time."
--Stephen Davies, The Great Horse-Manure Crisis of 1894One can only imagine the impact this had on crowded streets, not to mention the smell. Getting around must have been quite difficult. Getting anywhere faster in the conditions would be better served with flying horses rather than faster ones. In addition, the majority of the population in 1908 were living in cities, most within walking distance of their jobs. Trains and subways existed too too, as did automobiles. Automobiles were only more of a luxury item that the working class could not afford.
In light of all of this evidence, there is no mention of faster horses, not does it sound like anyone would have been asking for one. Now, if this isn't enough evidence, horses in 1908 were also quite dangerous. In fact, by 1916, there were 16.9 horse-related fatalities per 10,000 horse-drawn vehicles, a number said to be seven times that of Chicago's automobile fatality rate in 1997!
"The skittishness of horses added a dangerous level of unpredictability to nineteenth-century transportation. This was particularly true in a bustling urban environment, full of surprises that could shock and spook the animals. Horses often stampeded, but a more common danger came from horses kicking, biting, or trampling bystanders. Children were particularly at risk."
--Eric Morris, From Horse Power to HorsepowerDon't forget the mortality rate of horses (Warning: This is not for the squeamish).
City dwelling horses often fell on average of once every hundred miles of travel. If the horse (weighing an average of 1,300 pounds), was badly injured it would be shot on the spot and left to die, creating a ghastly obstruction that clogged streets and brought traffic to a halt. Special horse-removal services did exist at the time, but moving such a large carcass was not easy. As a result, street cleaners often waited for the corpses to putrefy so the dead horse could be sawed into pieces and carted off.
Problem solved? Well, there was also the problem of the smell, the flies, the horribleness of dead horses on the street and of course the risk of disease—Eric Morris, From Horse Power to Horsepower.
Source: http://i.imgur.com/U6ZC3ki.jpg
Now, with these conditions in mind, place yourself in 1908 as an inventor/businessman like Henry Ford. As you are researching on these problems and seeing them firsthand, would you be so callous and indifferent to these problems? Does it make sense in light of this history that Henry Ford would have ignored what people were experiencing, himself included, and think they were ignorant enough to simply want faster horses? Of course, not. These problems were impossible to ignore.
In fact, 10 years before Ford's Model-T arrived on the scene, the first ever city-planning meeting convened in New York City to address the problems facing large cities. One major concern was also related to horses, namely the overwhelming amount of horse manure infesting city streets. One reporter wrote in the Times of London that 50 years hence, every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure.—The Great Horse-Manure Crisis of 1894, Stephen Davies.
Faster horses? Hardly. To solve these major problems would require far more than just guesswork and assumptions. It would require research, ethnography, concept design, trial and error, testing, and so on.
So, what did Ford do in light of these problems? Did he invent the world's largest pooper-scooper, a more efficient way to kill the millions of flies born out of the tons of manure and dead horses? Did he strap rockets on the backs of horses to get them airborne or give everyone oxygen masks to simply deal with the problem? Of course not. He did something much smarter. No, he didn't invent the automobile. That was done a decade earlier by Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz, inventors of the high-speed gasoline engine in the 1880s—The Origins, mercedes-benz.com.au
Source: http://gottliebdaimler.blogspot.com/
Instead, Ford saw the problems that horses created, the conditions people were living in and the salaries people were making—on average, the living wage in 1908 was 22 cents per hour with the average worker bringing home between $200 and $400 per year—and delivered a solution that solved all of these problems at once. His solution was to invent the world's first assembly line where his inexpensive Model-T automobile could be made cheaply, quickly, and in large numbers. By 1914, just six years after introducing the Model-T, it sold more than all other automakers combined.—Ford Model T, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Quite an accomplishment for someone who supposedly ignored his customers and thought all they really wanted were faster horses.
Regardless of the facts, the "faster horses" myth still persists. It is troubling to consider, but it could very well be a convenient way to rationalize avoiding customer engagement due to the time and money required to do it effectively. It may also be a response to a culture where siloed teams can continue to place blame when things go wrong.
"When problems arise…"the enemy" becomes the players at the other positions, or even the customers…precluding any opportunity to learn from each others' experience."
--
