Reading Seminar 1 - Fredrik's notes

In the book Designing for Interaction, author Dan Saffer gives us four different approaches to the design process:

User-centered design, where the products are designed with the users' needs in mind throughout the whole design process making the users an integral part of development;

Activity-centered design, where focus lies on designing products to support particular tasks;

Systems design, an approach focusing on how components in a system works together, and the environment in which the system resides;

Genius design, relies on the developers' intuition and experience to create a good design.

I find that focusing too much on any one of these approaches will, in most cases, yield not-as-good-as-could-be results. However, in my opinion, when producing a product meant to be used by others you should always involve the users in the design process to get a product they can use with satisfaction. Should we see these as the only approaches to designing for interaction; aren't there other approaches?

Something mentioned in both the book and Key principles for user-centered systems design (J. Gulliksen et al.) was Personas which is a very interesting subject, and something I believe can be of great use when designing products. Since we'll be using this conceptual model in our project it was interesting to read more about it. The possibility to test all design ideas on this fictional person in every stage of development is great, and not time consuming at all.