Different worlds, different terminology

"Error: Your community has been deleted" Doesn't this error message sound like a very straightforward and easy to understand? What could possibly be wrong about it? Well, it is easier to understand the problem about this error message that has caused some users to scratch their heads wondering what is going on when you consider the context where this message was displayed. Was it some community based information system? Some kind of Facebook application or group? No, it was an information system for booking travels online. From your average users point of view booking a travel has very little to do with communities or being member of some community. So what exactly is this "your community" that has been deleted and why should its deletion be a problem when all you want to do is to book a trip? That being the case, what exactly is this "community" that the error message is talking about? Nobody but the designers of this system knows and they surely are not telling.

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.