4-Jill Moore

Is the User Always Correct?

In the book Designing the Obvious, Hoekman points out that sometimes designing for one persona or user might hinder the use of the product for other users. This is because the product is being designed for one person and while tailoring it to suit that one customer, that means it can't fit another. Just because one person asks for an additional feature does not mean it should be added. The additional feature my confuse or irritate other users and this may outweigh the benefit of adding it.

Hoekman advocates Activity-Centered Design as a solution to most design problems. By designing the activity to be as easy to accomplish as possible, the product is easy to understand for the largest number of people. However, he also recognizes that this is too narrow a solution and instead favors Situation-Centered, since that encompasses both the activity and the user.

Using a Situation-Centered philosophy when designing for Project 2 would have allowed me to solve problems the user was having and issues with the activity itself. I could have looked beyond the issues present in one or two people's use of the machine and looked at the activity of working out on a machine as a whole to explore changes in the design.