Title: What’s the waiter doing with the computer screen?
Context: Knowing how you want users to behave and how users actually behave are rarely the same thing.
Synopsis: This has to be one of the most interesting anecdotes about how users “hack” high tech systems in order to get it to do what they need it to do as opposed to what the system’s designers thought that they needed it to do. When the whiteboard pens are doing the heavy lifting for a screen based reservation system, you know that user testing wasn’t high on the priority of the design team. If in fact there ever was a design team to begin with…
Best Bit: “[T]o really find out what’s important to the users, and how a system is actually used, you need to observe real users, in the field.”
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