4 - Martin Johnson

Chapter 3 of Designing the Obvious may appear to be contradicting but I do not believe it is. I still believe that Hoekman wants one to pay attention to users needs. It's how one takes the data from the user and interprets it into important information or insights that is key. This is because one needs to understand that the individual user is not always right. So many issues come up when just looking at one user. They may be an outlier, be biased in some way, not be sensible/rational, not depict the target user well, or no know/lie about what they truly want or need. 

 

This is why designers cannot provide new features based on one or more users pushing for them. User centered focus is important but I believe Hoekman thinks to model user centered focus for the population over the ideas of a few individual users. This is where persona's come in handy. 

 

Having a persona helps battle the situations that there may be an unmet need. The user has no idea what it is or is unable to fathom what it could be realistically or make conjectures about this unmet need. Designing with a persona in mind will help make the final design more user friendly than just listening to one person who could be an outlier. This is done by personifying the voices of your real user voices through a fake persona. This can be problematic when dealing with large user bases or irrelevant persona information. However, Hoekman states that people are born liars and often don't express what they really mean or want. People don't make the right choice always, they make the comfortable safe choice which they already know. Having a persona helps combat this and assists the design in being effective for the general user population. 

 

Hoekman also states that as long as one knows the what to build and the why, this should guide one in the direction of benefiting users. In end design must be simple

 

Situations are made up of what, who, where, when, and why. The How is the application. Each circumstance revolves around every unique individual user. Designers in turn must understand all these circumstances and use this knowledge to affect the how, which is the one thing they control. People only remember one way to complete a task and don't try to advance their knowledge, especially towards what they won't use. 

 

A method we could have used to help our project two design would be to think in a more situational fashion. With a rowing machine, people are probably mostly using free row and interval row. With this in mind, we would want to test out this hypothesis, and then make as simple as possible changes accordingly. Because we control the how, we want to find out what situations people will most often be in, and design for these. It would be smart to have survey people and document them in action to see what they actually do. From here cut out all unnecessary functions which people won't/don't care to use or learn. The simpler and less unused parts of the design, the better.