Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Designing Products That Work the Way People Work: An Interview with Kate Gomoll (17 Sep 2004) One of the biggest surprises was that the design team's assumptions about early adopters were not always accurate. We visited users representing a variety of profiles, from a professional videographer, to a teenager whose parents purchased a more powerful PC and related video equipment just to get a VHS tape of his grandfather archived for perpetuity. Most users had a keen interest in video or film media, but little of the supposed relevant technical expertise of an early adopter. Whether the MyDVD application came with the PC, the camera, the DVD burner, or the conversion device, the users were confused by the multiple shrink-wrapped applications that came with their purchases. Initially, they didn't understand the total task flow or which parts of which applications to use to accomplish each step in the task. The MyDVD application was just a piece in a very confusing puzzle, not the focus of the user's attention. Article URL: http://www.uie.com/articles/gomoll_interview/ Read 77 more articles from User Interface Engineering sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Lessons from E-speak     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy