What I find compelling about the article is that it very eloquently describes something that I’ve always thought but was never able to put into words. The process of software development, as it largely exists today, is severely prone to being affected by McNamara’s Fallacy. Design (and I mean end-to-end experience design that encapsulates everything from flow to UI) is still perceived as this organic thing that is measured in terms of how your product makes users feel; it’s really about measuring emotion and perception change over a long-period of time. Donald Norman does a fantastic job of alluding to this in the first chapter of his book, Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things.

Yes, there are ways to de-risk your product development process by conducting usability studies, focus groups, A/B tests, and so on. But I feel like we often go about those activities with some degree of astigmatism because we haven’t yet been able to successfully quantify the true value of design due to our inability to measure it accurately. Companies like Apple and Target have definitely put design on the map, but there still remains this void in measuring it. We can’t just run a set of unit tests against the software we’re building to detect the design bugs. And till that happens we’re going to continue to see software that, for a lack of a better word, sucks.

If you happen to be dropping by MIX08 this year, I’ll be running a panel called What’s the Secret Formula? with panelists from Microsoft Office Ribbon, Microsoft Surface, Firefox and Adaptive Path. And, you bet your fanny I’m going to be pressing these guys to give me an answer to the question, “How do you design software that looks good, feels right and just works?” I have a hunch that all of them are going to tell me that you can’t do it if McNamara’s on the design team.