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  2. faculty.washington.edu faculty.washington.edu
    Design Methods
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    1. jmulugeta 04 Nov 2025
      While user studies can tell you a lot about the usability problems in your interface and help you identify incremental improvements to your design, they can’t identify fundamental flaws and they can’t tell you whether your design is useful. This is because you define the tasks. If no one wants to complete those tasks in real life, or there are conditions that change the nature of those tasks in real life, your user study results will not reveal those things. The only way to find out if something would actually be used is to implement your design and give it to people to see if it offers real value (you’d know, because they wouldn’t want you to take it away).

      When thinking about designers perspectives and role this does not surprise me, however thinking from the users perspective it does as I always assumed user studies were the ultimate way to test a design, but considering what the author stated about them (at times) missing fundamental flaws which can change that perspective. It’s interesting how the author says that considering designers define the tasks, the results can’t show whether people would actually want to do those tasks in real life. It makes me realize how important it is to test a design’s real-world value, not just its usability from seeing if people would actually miss it if it were taken away.

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    faculty.washington.edu/ajko/books/design-methods/empirical
  3. faculty.washington.edu faculty.washington.edu
    Design Methods
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    1. jmulugeta 04 Nov 2025
      Consistency and standards is the idea that designs should minimize how many new concepts users have to learn to successfully use the interface. A good example of this is Apple’s Mac OS operating system, which almost mandates that every application support a small set of universal keyboard shortcuts, including for closing a window, closing an application, saving, printing, copying, pasting, undoing, etc. Other operating systems often leave these keyboard shortcut mappings to individual application designers, leaving users to have to relearn a new shortcut for every application.

      When thinking about this specific section within the text, this paragraph about consistency and standards stood out to me because it shows how something as simple as consistency can completely shape the user experience. The example makes the point really clear, as when shortcuts and commands stay the same across applications, it saves users from constantly having to relearn basic actions. It also shows how thoughtful design is not always about adding new features, but about creating familiarity and predictability. That kind of consistency builds trust. When a user has familiarity with something that expectation of the user knowing and controlling understandably where they are and being able to direct where they want to head to is super important in terms of comfortability.

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    faculty.washington.edu/ajko/books/design-methods/analytical
  4. Oct 2025
  5. faculty.washington.edu faculty.washington.edu
    Design Methods
    1
    1. jmulugeta 07 Oct 2025
      Some design scholars are skeptical about human-centered design because they don’t believe modeling and verifying people’s needs through a few focused encounters is sufficient to actually address people’s problems, or systems of activities1212 Norman, D. A. (2005). Human-centered design considered harmful. ACM interactions. . These and other critiques lead to a notion of participatory design 1010 Muller, M. J., & Kuhn, S. (1993). Participatory design. Communications of the ACM. , in which designers not only try to understand the problems of stakeholders, but recruiting stakeholders onto the design team as full participants of a design process

      I think this is a really important approach prioritizing the perspective and opinion of humans inputs. I also think you can receive more insight and information through this approach, considering that you're not just considering the viewpoint of people affected or people who share their input as they face implications on these designs, but also bringing them along the process gives more than understanding, but perspective and opportunity to make change, to adhere to other individuals needs.

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    faculty.washington.edu/ajko/books/design-methods/design