About six months ago I wrote User-Centered EHR Design Considered Harmful (Try Process-Centered Instead). Healthcare Scene’s EMR and EHR blog gave it a mention and it rocketed around the Twittersphere for a couple days.
I recently stumbled on this presentation about Activity-Centred Design (British spelling). I thought several of its slides (adapted) would make a nice table about benefits versus drawbacks of user-centered versus activity-centered approaches to design.
| Benefits | Drawbacks | |
| User-Centered |
Improved usability
Fewer errors during usage Faster learning times Humanises software processes Minimises guesswork Understands user’s cognitive style Reduces user mistakes and improves recovery Focuses on the user |
Improvements for one group of users can be detrimental to another
Users are moving targets Users don’t always know what they want Research is expensive, unreliable, time consuming Tries to fix human mistakes rather than focussing on users accomplishing a task |
| Activity-Centered |
Users can adapt better than the technologies
Active observation vs passive observation Internal data: Statistics, heat-maps, eye-tracking Learn about user behaviour, rather than the user Activity has purpose. User has behaviour. Purpose is more predictable than behaviour UI evolves over time to facilitate user activity Uses analytic and cognitve data from users Solves problems instead of user mistakes |
[I’m sure there are disadvantages to activity-centered design, but none were listed in this presentation] |
Food for thought!