Goal-Directed Design encompasses the design of a product’s behavior, visual form, and physical form. Its fundamental premise is that the best way to design a successful product is to focus on achieving goals. Kim Goodwin, Designing for the Digital Age
My first job, after military service, was as a part-time draftsman while I attended engineering school. As I learned more about electronic and mechanical engineering technology in the classroom, I became more involved in the design of electronic products on the job. This usually included mechanical design of an instrument chassis, placement of electronic printed-circuit cards and a power supply and cooling system within the chassis, and control-panel interface design. The interface design was relatively simple: an on-off switch with an LED power indicator, a few other functional switches with LED indicators, and sometimes a keypad with an LCD display.
I transitioned from product design to marketing in the early 1980s. But, I continued to follow the advances in industrial product design, especially user interaction design as marketing-oriented websites and software-as-a-service (SaaS) products converged. In the early 2000s, I began to follow Alan Cooper’s goal-directed design methodology for improving interaction design.
When I joined a life sciences software company in late 2010, the number one request was for an improved laboratory information management system (LIMS) user interface. My role was primarily to provide the training, tools, and structure to product management, product design, and product development. This enabled a talented group of people with scientific and technology domain expertise to work together in an integrated team and use goal-directed interaction design, agile development, and scrum management to design, develop, and deliver a role-based user interface for lab scientists in next-generation genomics research labs.
The embedded eDoc describes how goal-directed design principles were applied to the program, and the structural and process changes that were made to support a new design and development paradigm.
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