User Experience Innovation: User Centered Design that Works

Concerns

As with many other methods described in this book, context awareness innovation has potential drawbacks. One key drawback is the risk of creating pain points. If you are guessing what the user wants in a certain situation, you will naturally be wrong in some cases. This can partially be solved by discreetly inviting the user to do things based on context awareness, rather than performing the functions automatically. If you, for example, choose to automatically change the mode of your mobile phone to silent based on contextual information, you may very easily create a serious pain point when your product makes a wrong guess. If you instead propose this option to the user, the risk is smaller, and it allows the user to stay in control. ...