Invisible User Goals
If you’re only supporting the most obvious user goals, you’re missing something
In the first project at my first job, I was brought in to contribute to the redesign of a command and control center for the military (I won’t get into specifics about which one or for what; that’s largely irrelevant here). To start the project, the team did a lot of research to understand the domain, the goals of the system, and the decisions made in the domain. The team defined the scope of several dozen goals that the members of this command center would be responsible for and their relationships to one another.
And although this was my first project and a lot of what we were doing and discovering was pretty novel to me, something in particular caught my eye as we started going through this analysis. In our representation of the goals and their relationships, the team had identified some goals that were outside the scope of the project. These were higher-level goals that we would not support explicitly in the design, but that the team had taken the time to uncover all the same.
The one that stood out to me was the need to “successfully manage the rules of engagement.” We wouldn’t be helping the members of the command center manage these, since these are largely set in stone from high up in the leadership chain. But the…
