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RE: position description

for

From: Mark Magennis
Date: Jul 28, 2005 8:29AM

I would add user insight to your list Rachel. Some people are better
than others at seeing things from the perspective of other web users -
users who may have very different abilities, experiences and attitudes
from their own. To make sites that work for a wide range of users
(unless they are very simple sites you are making), you have to develop
an ability to consider a design option and be able to judge whether it
will work in practice. This takes a lot more than just technical
knowledge.

One of the things that can help people build user insight is experience.
Experience of having met, observed and talked to many different users,
including users with disabilities and users of assistive technologies.
So I would add that kind of experience to your list.

It reminds me of a system administrator I had at a company I used to
work for. He was brilliant at figuring out what was wrong with my PC and
the problem always seemed to lie in a completely different place from
the one my 'logical problem solving' approach had led me to suspect. One
day I asked him how he figured it out. He touched his nose and said "I
smell it". His view was that PCs are far too complex to be logical, you
just need to have insight and 'smell', based on experience and empathy.

Mark