Studying Users for Developing Usable and Useful Products.
Sari Kujala, Mika Mäntylä · 2000
This article presents a framework for studying users in order to support designers in constructing usable and useful consumer products. The framework is aimed at designing consumer products for which users cannot be specified in advance, long lasting observations of users are difficult or impossible to arrange, and the time frames available are short. We discuss what kind of end user information is needed, how to gather it, and how to transfer the results to designers. We applied the developed framework in a case study and found that it is capable of providing a reasonable depth of knowledge in a short time frame with low costs. Comments from designers indicate that the methods give concrete input to design work, such as the necessary feature composition users need. Finally, we draw out a number of lessons learned.