User Experience Innovation: User Centered Design that Works

Step 2: Identify Current Sensing Capabilities

The next step is to list what your product is currently—or potentially—able to identify about the user, where the user is, and what the user typically does with your product. You want to list all the obvious sensor inputs that you already have (such as the location of the user, time of the day, date, other programs running at the same time, etc.), but you also want to list other elements that could potentially tell you more about the user and the context she is in right now. For example:

• If you are designing a smart phone, the phone will know the exact time, which country the device is in, and maybe even the exact location of the phone.
• If you are designing a washing machine, the machine may over ...