Capturing the Use Context of Computer Applications Issues for a seminar on User Research Victor Kaptelinin Feb 25, 2005

Issues for the Feb 25 seminar Why is user research necessary? What are the main ideas and methods of user research What are the limitations and hidden dangers of user research? How to counter objections to user research?

Objections to User Research Marketing already knows the users The product is new, there aren’t any users to observe Our users are all too different, we cannot possibly visit all of them We do not have enough time We do not have enough money One of the members of the development team was a user for 25 years We really have some great ideas already, we do not need to users to question what we are doing Users do not know anything about design Designers should design, not users We are users ourselves, we know what we need We do not know how to do UR We are working with focus groups We did a survey and asked users what they wanted