Its Pseudoscience!

I read with great interest the article on graphpaper.com.

Now, during the entire course of NM4210, we are guided to be very methodical in designing user experience. First, identifying the issue, then finding the root of the problem, user needs analysis and so on. That's perfectly fine. So based on that can we conclude that user experience design should only be based on quantitative research?

This is where I agree with the author. I mean, History as a subject has always been fascinated by facts. However, the way the different scholars put together historical happenings to reconstruct what happened continues to be of much academic fascination today and this can be the same for most of the social sciences. Even economics, with its jargon, technical data and fancy graphs, leave itself to the mercy of the economist to be deciphered.

You need to have a method to research but what goes in between, can be entirely subjective. You can design successive steps in which the user goes through during evaluation, but remember, although a target user, he or she is also an individual with unique cognitive and reasoning faculties. That's where a little flexibility and creativity goes hand in hand with straight up scientific methods to find out what the user really wants out of his experience with a product.

Probably most of us miss the essence of user experience design. It's all about the USER and not about "who said we should use what method". We should employ all (legal and moral) means necessary to know the user and what he/she wants and only then, we can even begin to think about crafting a creative, workable solution to provide him with a pleasurable user experience.