4-Brad Poertner

Week 4 Blog: Users

In lecture we learned about developing persona's and tailoring our designs around these persona's because we perceive these as the targeted group. The issue with this is that not all of our users are the same type of users. Each user finds themselves in a different situation while using the product. Each user may feel differently about the design,  but you cannot simply add or remove features because of just a couple users. While I do believe in the theory of "release early, and often" I also believe that some features will benefit one group of users while it will have no effect or a detrimental effect on the experience of another group of users. We cannot assume that the users are always right because not all users have the rigorous honesty that we need. Because of this, the users are NOT always right.

Hoekman advocates a system that involves researching the situations that your users are faced with when dealing with your design. There is a possibility that there are many types of situations possible with your design and you should develop your research around all known situations because this will benefit your users more than trying to focus on who your product is intended for, rather the matter in which it is used amongst a variety of users. Simply recreating these scenarios and observing the behavior of your user is an approach to creating a simple design that is fit for most.

After reading Hoekman and summarizing his argument, I would also agree with him and take the situational approach to project #2. There are multiple situations in which a user could have been using the machine but we only tested the one. It was a user who rarely uses the machine and works out often. Situations such as someone at home who uses this machine frequently could have produced different results. By analyzing the information that the multiple situations could have given us, we could have came up with a better design.