A friend just reminded me of a story from some time ago. I was giving a short presentation at a financial services company on the user-centered design process. The audience was a project team. I threw up some slides illustrating the various activities: researching users, designing the interface, implementing it, etc. Toward the end, the database programmer said, “Ohhhhhh, I understand, you do everything backwards!”

That’s because his process was: build a database, slap on a user interface, and test it… the exact opposite of what I would do.

I wonder if this is a way to explain UCD to technical audiences? “OK, what I’m about to tell you may be hard to believe. But there’s this whole field of people achieving great results by doing everything completely backwards!“