4-Jordan Mannfeld

Hoekman's User-Centered Focus on Design

Although the user plays a large and necessary part of the development of design, the user is not always correct. When creating a design, the designer should pay attention to not only one user, but many. Even then, it is not necessary to completely change or feel the need to add many new features. Hoekman explains how we, as users, are not as truthful as we may think. In general users may say they would use a feature, however never do so. For this reason, it is not always necessary to add more and more features to a design. 

Another thing to take note of is the way in which users actually do things when using a design. The majority of users tend to only learn 20 percent of what an application can do. Because of this, additional features may be unnecessary and only add confusion. New features may prove useful to some users, but to the majority, not essential. Simplistic designs often prove to be more useful. 

To address some of these decisions when creating a design, Hoekman advocates supporting a situation, not a specific user base. Designers should not only care about who the user is, but why they would be using the design, and how they would be doing so. In order to know how to create a design with this in mind, Hoekman's user-centered focus involves contextual inquiry and shadowing research methods. Observation and immersion into the situation in which a user uses a design are also key when trying to improve upon the design. 

Looking back at Project 2, we could have researched our users further using situational inquiry. This would have allowed us to observe the user in their own environment to see whether this had an affect on the use of the design. This would also have allowed us to get insight from the user on how they think, why they take specific actions, and what situations arise in the process. Contextual inquiry would enable us to see how effective or ineffective our design really is and help us improve upon it with the greatest benefit.