Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Limitations of Contextual Interviews

Humans can do something almost no other animal can: they can imagine themselves in hypothetical situations. In his book Stumbling on Happiness [Gil07], Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert explains that “the greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future.”^[6]

Although thinking about the future is indeed a great achievement, the unfortunate fact is that we’re quite bad at it, as we saw in the Atari Lynx story in Chapter 1, ​ User Research ​. Gilbert notes that “we make a systematic set of errors when we try to imagine what it would feel like if.”

His explanations of ...