In my post titled "Understand users, then ignore them", I stated that we should ignore users and focus on designing to support a specific activity. I spent a lot of time focusing on why Goal-Directed Design is wasteful, but not enough time explaining what to do instead.

We should practice what Donald Norman calls "Activity-Centered Design". Instead of writing personas and running them through hypothetical scenarios, focus on the activity itself.

In the case of Cooper's Airport Guide, the activity is that of locating various points of interest in an airport and figuring out how to get to each one without a lot of hassle. To do this, any kind of device with a wi-fi or Bluetooth connection would come in very handy. And a simple, 2-screen interface consisting of an index and a mapping system is an obvious solution. The user simply browses locations and clicks through to a map, which provides directions to the location from where the user currently stands.

Cell phones have offered similar solutions for a few years now. Ultimately, all Cooper Labs did was localize the solution to make it specific to an airport.

Cooper spent a lot of time and energy interviewing users, creating personas, writing scenarios, and so on. This effort cost a lot more money than it needed to. Any good designer who focused his or her attention on the activity itself could have come up with the same solution (perhaps even a better one) in far less time, with far fewer resources.

To be clear (and I'm saying this because someone asked), I'm not saying that because I've been in an airport, I know what everyone needs. That would be "self-referential design", and it's not good (unless, of course, you're the primary user).

I'm saying we should focus our design efforts on the acitivites our applications are meant to support. It takes less time and resorces, is less expensive, and results in designs that are every bit as good, if not better, than those that result from expensive user research.

The bonus side-effect is that, since you're not focusing on one audience, you open up the design to work for other audiences. Create something that supports an activity, and you create something that many user types can adapt to and use, regardless of their specific needs or goals.