Complex Level
Usefulness
Usefulness:
The relevancy of a designed outcome to people who use it for a purpose.
Designers who research usefulness hope to discover how well a product, service, or system meets people’s needs in a specific time and place. A useful design outcome will be adopted. An outcome that is not useful will be ignored and maybe even ridiculed. Research can reveal if a design outcome is placed at the “right” place and the “right” time for the “right” people. Discoveries like these can reveal why an outcome is effective or why it is underutilized. With knowledge from this research, designers can redesign outcomes or possibly move them to different places and times, so outcomes are more useful.
