Lecture 2:

Goal-Directed Design
Chapter 1 of the reference book

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Objectives
❑ To understand why digital products need better design methods.

❑ To understand the importance of recognizing user goals.

❑ To understand the goal-directed design process.

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Introduction
❑ If we design and construct products in such a way that the people
who use them achieve their goals, these people will be satisfied,
effective, and happy.

❑ Developers, instead of planning and executing with a mind towards

satisfying the needs of the people who purchase and use their
products, end up creating technologically focused solutions that are
difficult to use and control.

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Human-oriented design activities
❑ Understanding users’ desires, needs, motivations, and contexts.

❑ Understanding business, technical, and domain opportunities,

requirements, and constraints.

❑ Using this knowledge as a foundation for plans to create products

whose form, content, and behavior is useful, usable, and desirable,
as well as economically and technically feasible.

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Digital products need better design
methods
❑ Digital products often blame users for making mistakes that are not
their fault, or should not be.

❑ Example 1:

➢ Why didn’t the program notify the library? What did it want to notify the
library about? Why is it telling us? And what are we OKing, anyway? It
is not OK that the program failed!

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Digital products need better design
methods (Cont’d)
❑ Example 2: Palm Treo smartphone

➢ It doesn’t anticipate that a user might want to add

the phone number of someone who has just
called to an existing contact.

➢ User is forced to go through a complicated steps

involving copying the phone number, navigating
to the contact in question, and pasting into the
appropriate field.

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Digital products need better design
methods (Cont’d)
❑ Digital products require people to think like computers.

❑ Example: Microsoft Word

➢ If a user wants to rename a document he is editing, he must know that

he must either close the document, or use the “Save As...”menu
command (and remember to delete the file with the old name).

➢ These behaviors are not consistent with the way a normal person thinks
about renaming something; rather, they require that a person change
his thinking to be more like the way a computer works.

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Digital products need better design
methods (Cont’d)
❑ Digital products exhibit poor behavior.

❑ Example: Microsoft Word

➢ If you save a Microsoft Word document, print it, and then try to close it,
the program once again asks you if you want to save it!

➢ The act of printing caused the program to think the document had
changed, even though it did not.

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Why are these products so bad?
❑ Ignorance about users
➢ No good understanding of what it takes to make users happy.

❑ Conflicting interests
➢ Between serving human needs and construction priorities.

❑ Lack of a process
➢ What’s left out is a repeatable, predictable, and analytical process for
transforming an understanding of users into products that both meet
their needs and excite their imaginations.

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Recognizing user goals
❑ Users’ goals are often quite different from what we might guess
them to be.

❑ Example: accounting clerk’s goal

➢ Process invoices efficiently? (probably not true).
➢ Efficient invoice processing is more likely the goal of the clerk’s
employer.
➢ Clerk’s goal is more likely concentrating on appearing competent at his
job and keeping himself engaged with his work while performing routine
and repetitive tasks.

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Goals versus tasks and activities
❑ Goals are not the same as tasks or activities.
➢ A goal is an expectation of an end condition
➢ Both activities and tasks are intermediate steps (at different levels of
organization) that help someone to reach a goal or set of goals.

❑ Since goals are driven by human motivations, they change very

slowly-if at all-over time.

❑ Activities and tasks are much more transient, since they are based
almost entirely on whatever technology is at hand.

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Example
❑ For example, when traveling from St. Louis to San Francisco, a
person’s goals are likely to include traveling quickly, comfortably,
and safely.

➢ In 1850, a settler wishing to travel quickly and comfortably would have

made the journey in a covered wagon; in the interest of safety, he would
have brought along his gun.

➢ Today, a businessman makes the journey in a jet aircraft and, in the

interest of safety, he is required to leave his firearms at home.

❑ The goals of the settler and businessman remain unchanged, but

their activities and tasks have changed so completely with the
changes in technology that they are, in some respects, in direct
opposition.

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Designing to meet goals in context
❑ The design target really depends on the context—who the users are,
what they are doing, and what goals they have.

❑ You simply can’t create good design by following rules disconnected

from the goals and needs of the users of your product.

❑ Examples:
➢ Call-distribution system
• Efficiency

➢ Kiosk in a corporate lobby helping visitors find their way around

• Ease of use for first-time users

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Goal-directed design process
❑ User research
➢ How people actually use products

❑ Translating research results into design solutions

❑ Bridging the gap

❑ Designers should be involved in the research process.

➢ Gets them thinking about users long before they propose solutions.
➢ It is often difficult for pure researchers to know what user information is
really important from a design perspective.

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Goal-directed design process

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Goal-directed design process:
Research

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Goal-directed design process:
Modeling

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Goal-directed design process:
Requirements

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Goal-directed design process:
Framework

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Goal-directed design process:
Refinement

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Goal-directed design process:
Support

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Questions answered by the goal-directed
design
❑ Who are my users?
❑ What are my users trying to accomplish?
❑ How do my users think about what they’re trying to accomplish?
❑ What kind of experiences do my users find appealing and
rewarding?
❑ How should my product behave?
❑ What form should my product take?
❑ How will users interact with my product?
❑ How can my product’s functions be most effectively organized?

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Questions answered by the goal-directed
design (Cont’d)
❑ How will my product introduce itself to first-time users?
❑ How can my product put an understandable, appealing, and
controllable face on technology?
❑ How can my product deal with problems that users encounter?
❑ How will my product help infrequent and inexperienced users
understand how to accomplish their goals?
❑ How can my product provide sufficient depth and power for expert
users?

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