In Chapter three of designing the obvious, the author makes
a point of not listening to every need of the users. To me focusing in on every
need of the users is a terrible idea, I think it is important to take account
of what some of the users want but we cannot change our design every time
someone doesn't like something. If every user has something to add onto the design,
your design is going to end up being very clutter and unorganized. Hoekman than
goes on to say that “user-centered” design should be thrown out the window and
that we should not focus on what the user want, because humans rarely know what
exactly we want, and that we should focus on the situation that the user is in.
We should be a shadow in the activity that we are redesigning, observing what
makes them frustrated or mad and refining the activity from their point of view.
Looking at how I redesigned Project #2, I can see that
situation-centric design might have been the better way to go about creating
the prototype. I used the “user-centered” approach and I add/ took away things
that the user wanted or had trouble with. Instead, I could have shadowed
someone for an entire workout, as opposed to just telling the users to
accomplish some task that I had created. Making the redesign more helpful to
the user instead of, what they thought they wanted.
Hi Casey,
ReplyDeleteGood references to the reading. It's easy to see why companies don't often do situation-centric design tests...a whole workout over several users can be time consuming. I agree with you though that it would be worth it. Instead, there's evidence all over many workout machines that they just added features that users thought they wanted...and I don't know about you, but I never use 90% of them!