Failing to meet your users' expectations – a case study

Oh, dear. Updated at least once per week, it says in the header, and there's been no update for nearly a month. My only excuse, really, is that I don't think I have any users yet..;-)

I've started a further education course recently (and yes, I was thinking of using that as an excuse too). The course is an Open University course on Interaction Design, which I'm taking to formalise some of the experience I have, to broaden my theoretical knowledge, and hopefully learn some practical things I can use day-to-day too. It's based around the book "Interaction Design - beyond human-computer interaction", by Preece, Rogers, and Sharp (there's a good website accompanying this book at www.id-book.com).

One thing that was mentioned pretty briefly, and that really caught my interest, was in the section about why its important to involve users. Why is it important to involve users? The reason that probably jumps to your mind – and the one that jumped to mine – is that only by involving users do you really understand what they want and need, and how they think. However, two other reasons are introduced in the book:

• expectation management
• ownership

In short, the first of these is that by involving users they understand what it is they're going to get, and aren't disappointed by high expectations that aren't met. By involving them, they also gain an idea of what they can and can't do with the product before it actually goes live. This is linked to ownership: by feeling that they have been listened to and involved in the development, your users are more likely to feel that it's not something foisted upon them, but something they can be actively proud of. Note the interesting correlation, by the way, to the discussion on the change curve.

So (if I actually had any users) I would have done a poor job at this. I say that there will be an update every week, and then there is isn't. If I'd said there would be an update every month, would my users be delighted now? They'd probably be happier than they are religously searching for their nugget of wisdom once a week and finding nothing. So Jakob's advice (point seven) on telling people how often you'll be posting only really works if you keep it up.

I very much hope normal service will be resumed . . and I'm sure you all do to.