4-Matthew Bloom-Carlin

With any new piece of technology, users will inevitably gripe about the omission of some specific feature.   Some of these concerns will overlap, but is likely that the masses of users will provide a large variety of omitted features.  If you commit to providing everything the user(s) ask for, you have two risks:

1.       In your focus on designing exactly what a specific user wants, you alienate other users.
2.         You product becomes complicated and difficult to use.

In order to avoid this, Hoekman formerly advocated an entirely activity centered approach to design; instead of designing for the user, you design for the activity they need to do.  However over time Hoekman realized this approach had its flaws.  He now favors a situational centered design approach.  Essentially, the user creates a situation, and then the designers design for the situation they have created.  In this way the designer does not lose focus on the user, and also does not get caught up in pandering to specific users.

In Project #2 an understanding of situation-centric research would have helped a lot.  We could have done interviews with a few elliptical users and attempted to understand their situation better.  Asking questions not about what sort of features they would want, but instead about the nature of their situation.  Are they working towards a goal of running a 5k?  Are they injured and using the elliptical in the mean time?  Are they just trying to lose weight?  With a grasp of the situation we could have designed features for that situation and thus for the user.