Do we really need to divide users into expert users and novice users?
I am reading a very interesting article by Johnson, Johnson and Zhang (2004). This article has suggestions on how to redesign the interface of an existing healthcare system. The trigger to write this article is as stated “numerous health care systems are designed without consideration of user-centered design guidelines”. They point out the need to understand your users. They then go and divide users into expert users and novice users. Expert users need the rapid response time and shortcuts and the novice users need a lot of feedback. I do not think this sort of discrimination is necessary. Any user needs feedback, rapid response time and easier ways to do repetitive tasks (shortcuts). If you check Johan Redström winning article I commented on, there is no such thing as “a user” before the the system is in operation. There are only people we think would use the system we are developing. Discriminating between people in such a way is just to give excuses for developing suboptimal interfaces. The ground breaking iPhone interface proves this. There could be and interface that any person can understand and use.
The only way I see that a similar discrimination makes sense is if you focus on the tasks that the system will perform. There are systems that are meant to be used by system administrators and database administrators. These are mainly servers. These systems avoid the overhead of a Graphical User Interface (GUI). These systems need to squeeze the fastest response time possible out of the available hardware. But, the division here is based on the system task and not the people that will be using the system.
