These lectures were about practical ideas and techniques of interaction design to create user experience. The ideas and techniques that they offered are mostly based on behavioral science, including psychology, with a tendency to analyze the requirements and needs of users based on outer understanding of users. But what is ignored or not seriously addressed in these lectures is a discussion of understanding inner wishes of users as people.
I want to point to the ethnographic methods that try to understand people as users in their own contexts--their specific wishes, rituals, and desires.
In fact, in an engineering school that tries to have a human-oriented aspect, or user-centric approach, toward design of interactive digital artifacts -- supposed to be easy to use, easy to learn, and easy to understand by users -- focusing on behavioral approaches based on scientific observation of people as users is not a great achievement. This is not enough. This approach unfolds only one part of the solution. The other major part of the solution, one which is more important is teaching the students of engineering programs how to understand users of digital artifacts as people with their own specific interests, needs, and wishes. In this way, the education system should take an approach that broadens the world-view of students beyond limited observation based on scientific methods, be it engineering, psychology, or behavioral science. The students should learn to see the problems, the usage domain, and the people beyond laboratories, with a real attempt to understand people, rather than different design methods and designs--the understand people in their social and human context.
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