If you try to apply the essence of natural selection to human-driven design, you have to decide what alternatives to build, what KPIs to monitor, how to monitor them, when to kill them off, and most importantly, how to achieve useful results within months, not millenia. That’s pretty much what User Centred Design aims to do, and I know you advocate that as a process :-)
]]>Thus I have often thought that too much UI design already resembles evolution, based as it is on the Darwinian principles of natural selection in the wild.
In the same way that architects inflicted their 1960s ‘experiments’ in modern living on the landscape, designers have often seen it as their right, nay their duty, to spew forth thousands and thousands of UI variants onto the marketplace, just to see which ones work. We are only just beginning to see Darwinian principles at work, as designers begin to twig that products with strong UI’s perform better.
]]>