This interesting interview by the folks at Good Experience presents an excellent case for user centered design in the business context. Elizabeth's conclusion is telling, "We'll continue to grow this idea of discipline. Now that we've proven to the organization that there's value in user testing and upfront planning, we'll be doing more of it and getting better at it. The big challenge of the past two years was selling the organization on this whole idea. Now we have to deliver on everything we said we'd deliver by having a focus on customer experience."

This Digital Web interview is an excellent introduction to baseline topics in user-centered design and issues relevant to information architecture. The interviewees are Peter Merholz, of Peterme fame, and Nathan Shedroff, an old hand (who's probably younger than me) at the business, talk about subjects including understanding UCD, the business of UCD, and the Process of UCD. Read the interview...

Three recent articles in UsabilityNews address the relationship between extreme programming (XP) and user-centered design, providing a kind of point-counterpoint-point on the issue.

• "DIS 2002: Xtreme Programming makes Good Partner to User-Centred Design," was a short UN news piece describing how "a team from Xerox PARC showed the audience at the Designing Interactive Systems 2002 conference that XP and UCD can be complementary."
• "Response: Why XP and UX have Something in Common," presented a different take on the subject from George Olsen, who argues that the XP approach should be separated from the "Big UpFront Design" that UCD requires because XP deals not with interface issues but with functionality.
• "Response: The Nature of XP," is a response to George Olsen's article by William Petri, in which he argues that the nature of XP, its iterative development cycle and requirement to satisfy client-defined tests makes XP an excellent complement to UCD.

From IBM. "User-Centered Design is a well established process that has been widely adopted by many organizations to deliver products that meet users' expectations. IBM has regularly enhanced this process, which has now been consolidated within the broader framework of User Engineering. For completeness, the key information on User-Centered Design is retained for reference." IBM's collection of user-centered design resources. Visit the website...