Something which came out of the seminar at Brunel earlier this week (thanks to everyone who came along) was the idea that any method of selecting ways to design products that aim to shape or guide users’ behaviour really must incorporate some evaluation of users’ actual goals in using the product – users’ intent – alongside that of the designer/planner. This seems obvious, but I hadn’t explicitly thought of it before as a prerequisite for the actual selection method (instead, I’d assumed these kinds of issues could be shaken out during the design process, based on designers’ experience and judgement, and then in user testing). In retrospect it really does need to be considered much earlier in the process, while actually choosing which approaches are going to be explored. (Given how long I’ve spent reading about bad design and poor usability, you’d think I’d have twigged this earlier.)
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