Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design

Chapter 2. Understand Users, Then Ignore Them

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• Understand How Users Think They Do Things

• Understand How Users Actually Do Things

• Know How to Uncover Reality

• Write Use Cases

• Write Use Cases

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Whether or not you want to believe it, the vast majority of software projects fail. They fail to live up to customers’ expectations, fail to sufficiently support the activities they were conceived to make easier, and fail to gain the ever-elusive customer loyalty earned by companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon.

Many factors can be blamed for the ultimate failure of a product, but they tend to fall into the same few camps of thought. Sometimes a product fails because it doesn’t stand up against the competition. Sometimes it’s because the market ...