A while back I finished Steve Mulder’s book, The User Is Always Right, a practical guide to creating and using personas for the web. After finishing it, it kind of sat around for a few weeks, but has recently become part of my right hand. The chapters on qualitative and quantitative data gathering have been incredibly helpful.

Recently, my friend Justin and I were considering the development of a web application for the Boy Scouts of America. This was a great opportunity to put the topic of data gathering to work. In the end, we set up a meeting with a local council member. Was it ever an eye opener.

For starters, we learned that much of what we perceived to be useful from the outside, looking in, wasn’t. The things that we thought up that were useful, were already done by other companies (poorly, I might add, but still existed). And last, our meager reasonable price point ended up being way outside the normal Boy Scout budget. In the end, for the cost of a cup of coffee, we learned enough to scrap the project. Which, I might add, is a lot cheaper than building out something and having it fail.

“Do not propose solutions until the problem has been discussed as thoroughly as possible without suggesting any.”
~ Norman R. F. Maier

Anyway, excellent book. I highly recommend it for learning about approaches for designing ANY kind of product; whether it’s for the web, desktop, service, whatever.