4-Donovan McCloskey

After reading chapter 3 of designing the obvious, I think that Hoekman realizes the importance of paying close to user needs. If you don’t test your designs on anyone other than yourself, you will most definitely be creating an incomplete design. The trick is to understand what user suggestions you consider and ones you weed out. I think the easiest way to differentiate between these two is simply by taking the most common suggestions from a large sample size. If you show your design to a lot of people and take their honest opinion/reaction then you can more accurately improve your design. This is not saying that one person’s suggestions are false but in order to successfully improve your design you have to be confident in what people want.

In project 2 we were responsible for taking a poor design and improving it based on user interactions. In the 3^rd chapter by Hoekman, he mentions the idea of situation-centric approach to research and I think this is very applicable to our project 2. Using a situation-centric approach means to tackle a design flaw by focusing on a specific situation that the design would be used. So for example in our attempt to recreate a work out machine interface we would take a step back and focus on how this interface works with the specific task to a warm up run. We then ask questions like, how quickly can a user hop on, quickly run, and get off?  Or, does this interface require unnecessary information that is not needed in a quick warm up?  By asking these situation centered questions we can focus our re design resources to solve a smaller problem within the bigger problem of a bad design.