Understanding Challenges of Designing for Complex Users by Adapting the Existing Framework

Abstract

This study suggests target user classification into simple and complex users based on the designer’s background. In particular, we define complex users as those, whose needs and problems require specific knowledge outside of the designer’s general knowledge. The gap that designers often face while dealing with this kind of users raises comprehension, communication, and accessibility issues. We analyzed three different levels of information inquiry to address these issues and understand challenges of designing for complex users. This was achieved by adapting a simple matrix analysis framework based on the Quality Function Deployment’s House of Quality (HOQ) concept. Our paper contributes to the design community by serving as a validation of adjusting the existing framework as a part of the design process. We expect that this will help designers to extract correlations between identified problems and understand which elements to tackle at the outset to achieve effective design development processes.