What the design goals of the user interface? Often, these are to make a user-friendly, intuitive, powerful product that is fast and easy to use.

Well, that's a good start and every product should have these characteristics. How does a product express these characteristics? What, exactly is 'user-friendly'? What does 'intuitive' mean? How do I make my product have these features?

The first thing that the user interface designer to think about the user or users of a product. What is the point of your product? What does the user wish to accomplish using your product?

For a discussion about design goals, it may seem that we sure are asking a ton of questions here. We have not even started asking questions! This is the first point about user interface design. We need to know what the user wants to do with our product, we need to know what are the user's goals and even know about the user's environment. How will they use the product in their real life? Is it a typical office setting full of popup demands from bosses, meetings, emails?

Or is the setting at an airport checkin counter, where the user is dealing with a line of passengers wanting to rebook flights and upgrade their seats? All these factors must be considered in order to begin to understand the design goals of the product.

Even before we can understand the user's goals, we need to know more about the user. Maybe there are more than one type of user. For example, a simple message board system has users, the people that read and post messages. What about the people that maintain the message boards, that moderate the boards, set up new boards, remove stale or inappropriate boards.

The first step is to understand at a very high level what people wish to accomplish with the product that we want to build.

Let's look at an example.For example, let's think about the users for a message board system, there are people that want to read and post messages, and there are people that want to administer the system.

So, we have two camps of users. Is that so? Let's talk with some administrators and see what they think. We ask a potential administrator some questions and find out something new. They employ hosts that will moderate the boards from remote locations such as from home on dialup phone lines. The administrators not only need to administrate users, they need to adminstrate hosts that need to adminstrate users and moderate boards.

One of the administrator's goals may be to have multiple moderators reviewing and deleting messages, and deleting the accounts of unruly users without encountering frustrating system problems. These goals seem reasonable.

Yet, the majority of commercial message board systems, some with six-digit license fees, only allow on administrator at a time doing all the fucntions. There are systems that grind to a halt the minute a second administrator starts deleting messages. There may not even be a provision for a moderator role. Assumptions were made that only one administrator would use these system.

In trying to understand the requirements for the users of a message board system that we designed, we questioned the potential administrators about what they wanted in a system. At the beginning, this is really difficult. Most users don't know what they want, or will explain what they want in relation to what they already use. They may want many features only because they needed them to workaround deficiencies in products with which they have prior experience. We encountered this very problem in interviewing users for the message board system.

The next section will discuss what we have learned about the discovery process.