Let's Get Constitutional

The DHCAT team quickly realized that creating an experience-based assessment model required initial consensus on basic principles. So the first order of business became the development of a “constitution” that would articulate all the foundation assumptions, concepts and principles that would guide the development effort. The full list of all 15 Guiding Principles can be found here.

While the “framers” of this document are all long-time benchmarking professionals, there is nothing conventional in the framework they created for media PC evaluation. The core tenet of the DHCAT constitution is that it faithfully express a platform’s goodness in terms of user experience quality, not as a speed-centric, bigger-is-better index that is ultimately meaningless to most consumers. The tool’s outputs will focus on actual capabilities, identifying things a system does well and those it does poorly, with particular attention to real-life tasks that are important to actual users.

As work progressed and the development team inevitably confronted difficult decisions, the constitution provided consistent direction for the form, content and functionality of DHCAT 1.5, becoming, in effect, the heart and soul of the new tool.