There’s an interesting article out in Information Systems Journal about the difficulties encountered while trying to get a list of requirements from users. It’s not a problem that affects users only, but it also affects investigators and designers of user centered design:
Pitts, M. G., & Browne, G. J. (2007). Improving requirements elicitation: An empirical investigation of procedural prompts. Information Systems Journal, 17, 89-110. [via Blackwell Synergy] or [via World Cat]
The below figure is a chart from the article which outlines the various cognitive limitations that users and designers have with processing information. While a lot of this may not be new, it’s handy to see it all in one place.
This is a great list of pitfalls to keep in mind while designing from a user’s perspective. For example, and here I’m thinking about Library2.0, I have this nagging worry that our users may not want the type of information interactivity that librarians love. The same thing holds for wikis; I love wikis, but if you’ve ever tried to get a small group of busy people to use a wiki, it can be tough sledding. So what exactly is going on? To what extent do our users want to get into metadata, tagging, reviewing, etc.? While I believe they do want to, I also think it will take a series of usability studies to find out why exactly.
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