Bryan Clark

A number of people have asked me why they can’t brainstorm. Lets clarify this… you can brainstorm! I actually hold no mental powers over you right now and am willing to allow you to live a free and normal life. Later my IRON GRIP OF DOOM will strike down upon you and force you to brainstorm, but that’s later.

Shelving The Brainstorm

Seriously, why do we want to shelve the brainstorm for now? (I say shelve because we will get to it, and you should keep those bubbling ideas around for later). However we need facts and problems to solve first. If we’re designing something for someone else to enjoy, we first need to understand them.

Recently someone inside of Red Hat said he wants to “…design with facts, not just opinions.”. Well that’s exactly what we [1] want to do here. There seems to often be a level of mistrust of designers (like myself) or usability people too that we’re just people who get to make up the answers on the spot. How should people change their desktop background? This way! – Because I’m the usability person and what I say goes. Well that’s not how things work and it’s not how they should work.

When coming up with new solutions to problems you have to first understand the problems. Understand the needs people have. To do that you have to meet the people, reach out to them, ask them questions. Then we can conjure up new ideas, and instead of running off for the next year to create something… we’ll prototype them and bring them back to the people we first connected with. We’ll ask those people, “Hey what do you think of this?”. When we get their feedback we’ll continue to iterate on our prototypes and ideas, maybe we’ll go back to the drawing board but we’ll continue using the same process. This creates solutions based off real data, not opinions of certain people on how things should work and it’s more fun to have people who you can test experiments on, right?

Footnotage

[1] More clarifications, the “we” that I continually use here is you the person reading this and me the person writing this and everyone else who is participating in our little research experiment. This isn’t my employer [2] or fellow employees. Since this is all in the open anyone who is working on a project that could take advantage of this is welcome to use the data as they see fit, I should probably look into some kind of Creative Commons license or something for any content derived.

[2] Whilst I may take my federally mandated “smoke breaks” to blog and read emails people send me in my real working world life I am developing on something else. There is no Red Hat Enterprise Digital Video Recorder (RHEDVR), or Red Hat Advanced Television Server (RHATS), or Red Hat Global Television File System (GTVFS), or Red Hat Virtualized Television Experience (RHVTE). If you work for any kind of digital video recording company [3] please do not call my manager and attempt to get me fired for creating these products I have listed, they are fictitious.

[3] Whee recursion! No company has attempted this, nor would I really expect them to do such a thing. This is me trying to cover my pretty little white ass. It’s been suggested that I use my gmail account instead of my @ redhat address to let people know there is some differentiation. But… I’m lazy.

more questions to come, stay tuned for my next “smoke break”