4 - Alex Li

User-centered design is where the designer aims to better understand the needs and wishes of the users so that the interactive system can better help them meet those goals (page 40). As Norman stated,” One concern is that the focus upon individual people (or groups) might improve things for them at the cost of making it worse for others. The more something is tailored for the particular likes, dislikes, skills and needs of a particular target population, the less likely it will be appropriate for others (page 45).” So user-centered design is great for designing applications to fit certain niches because you are designing for the user/group but the thing is People adapt to technology. An activity-centered design is where designers are constructing an application to support an activity. The reason that this design is more effective from the start is that you can look at the task at hand instead of people. At the bottom of page 47 Hoekman was very strongly for ACD, activity-centered computer, but he later talks about how UCD, user-centered design, and ACD have problems. For example UCD is too broad and looks too much at a person and ACD is too narrow and doesn’t look at the person enough.

For project, 2 we were to redesign a fitness machine and tell why we made the changes. So Hoekman talk about situation-centric approach, which is where designers’ design based on the situation. The book talks about the iPod and how it didn’t have all the amazing features that other music players had because of how simplistic it was. It turned out to be a major benefit because people when running or exercising wanted the least amount of buttons and options to push when exercising. A change that I would have done on the second project was to take out and extraneous features on an exercise machine and only included what a person truly needs when they exercise to make it simple and easy to use.