I am a Business Intelligence consultant and deal with both technical consultants and business users. I think the concept of UCD leaps beyond just software and into information consumer markets as well.

Take enterprise Dashboards for instance, we have technical consultants who cant design them from the perspective of information consumption and clarity and we have graphics designers who think that dashboards should be ‘pretty’, whereas from an information visualization perspective, there is more than what meets the eye.

For instance, consider the popularity of pie charts, experts in info.viz agree that we r unable to compare angular/circular areas as compared to linear ones (bar graphs), yet pie charts are pretty pervasive.

Another example is using 3d charts when the 3rd dimension does not add value, there are also the problem of occlusion.

Stephen Few has a fantastic book on Enterprise Dashboards which talks about usability of information.

Keep on with the blogs….