Along the fault lines – designing for deception, dishonesty, and other happy facts of human nature

Adam Greenfield published an interesting article for Vodafone’s Receiver magazine on the subject of use cases, or more particularly perverting our current idea of use cases in favour of ‘designing for deception, dishonesty, and other happy facts of human nature’.

[Use cases] start with a neatly conventional circumstance (‘Jill wants to buy a new ringtone’) and end in a similarly pat fulfillment (‘Jill successfully downloads and installs the ringtone’).

I have never seen a use case that starts with a proposition like ‘Greta wants to sneak out and meet her lover Patrick, without making her husband Bertrand suspicious.’ Or ‘Kenji wants his private contact information to be more available to his close friends than the random boys he picks up clubbing.’ Or ‘Claudia wants to IM and play games on her computer at work, while making it seem as if she’s busy getting things done.’

And yet, experience tells us that’s just what people do with technology