Adam Greenfield has just published an eye opening article [or the PDF to avoid irritating Flash movie] for Vodafone’s Receiver magazine on the subject of use cases, or more particularly perverting our current idea of use cases in favour of ‘designing for deception, dishonesty, and other happy facts of human nature’:
[Use cases] start with a neatly conventional circumstance (‘Jill wants to buy a new ringtone’) and end in a similarly pat fulfillment (‘Jill successfully downloads and installs the ringtone’).
I have never seen a use case that starts with a proposition like ‘Greta wants to sneak out and meet her lover Patrick, without making her husband Bertrand suspicious.’ Or ‘Kenji wants his private contact information to be more available to his close friends than the random boys he picks up clubbing.’ Or ‘Claudia wants to IM and play games on her computer at work, while making it seem as if she’s busy getting things done.’
And yet, experience tells us that’s just what people do with technology.
Greenfield calls the gap between the assumptions and the reality ‘fault lines’. Slightly unfairly, he cites the relative failure of SMS in the North American market as an example of a use case without a market. Given the massive take-up of texting in Europe this probably came as a surprise to the likes of Vodafone: everyone in Britain who owns a mobile phone uses SMS. My Mum and Dad text, and they hardly ever have their phone turned on. I sent three texts today, and I don’t even like mobile phones. Her indoors organises her social life through SMS. That said, the cell networks over here decided to cooperate with each other – something that failed to happen in the US as I understand it. I digress.
Greenfield goes on to suggest that it would be ‘unexpected and fun’ if we could include a few edge situations in our use cases. After all, use cases often reflect what we want users to do rather than what they actually do. A bit of imagination and lateral thinking never did anyone any harm.
robert wrote:
wonderful stuff… i’ve just pointed our corporate marketing bods at this on the basis of a recent presentation they gave to our global salesforce. the subject of the presentation was a new ROI tool and they created some executives ( Jill, Joe & Jeff etc.) and listed their needs based on objectives they had been set. you guessed it; jill needs to lower costs, jeff wants improved operational efficiency and naturally joe wants happier customers. the question now of course is can their desires and requirements be met?
you won’t be astounded to learn that of course the could. not only that, but we can exceed their expectations and improve their standing within their own organisation, all with a single technology platform and of course, our services.
not one consideration was given to any objections these executives may have, or downsides…
the sad thing is that the sales team lapped it up and were even told to run through this ROI workbook with the customer!
at least i can sleep easy tonight safe in the knowledge that we have an entire sales team that can perfectly pitch the perfect product and services to the perfect chief exec, finance director and IT group and all live the utopian (or is that american?) dream. perfect.
robert.
Rich wrote:
Robert – I get the feeling you’re now feeling better have got that off your chest :-) Hope Adam’s article has some effect.
Zelnox wrote:
I do not have a mobile phone, but have read that in Asia and Europe, SMS are very popular (and so cheaper) than in North America.
Apparently, the disconnect between IM networks and cell networks was a problem here. We (North Americans) probably adapted to IM before SMS, whereas elsewhere, mobile phones were more popular first. I remember reading how high school children in Japan would have their own pager (with text). But most modern mobile phones with Java should be able to use IM now.
It can also be attributed to the maturity of the market in Asia and Europe. People have learned to be polite and not yap loudly on the phone in public.
Rich wrote:
I wish! If only that were true. At least with the popularity of SMS some people have the decency to text instead phone to tell hubby they’ll be home in 5 minutes.