Users are from Mercury, Designers are from Pluto

For a designer designing an information system the users and their everyday work are usually as distant as Mercury and Sun are from Pluto. Who are those users, what is their background, what do they do, what do they expect, how to best support their work, what kind of terminology they use, what kind of systems they are already familiar with? For a designer trying to answer these questions without any kind of contact to the actual users and their everyday life, is like trying to observe weather in Mercury (users) and Solar activities (context of use) from Pluto. Things get much easier if you communicate with people who are situated closest to observe the users and their everyday life - namely the users themselves. Of course you have to remember that since users are not designers and they lack an objective view of the context of use as a whole, so just asking them to design information system for themselves is usually a bad idea. The designer has the design expertise, objective viewpoint and moral responsibility to design the best possible system for these particular users in this particular context of use.