Suchman’s work — especially her research at Xerox PARC — radically transformed how we evaluate whether technology “works” for people. Instead of working with pre-defined usability metrics, she underscored the necessity to examine the ways in which people actually use technology in their environments. She learned that usability is not just about technology being able to function for an end user but also about how people construct understandings of and navigate technology in practice.
In the video we are seeing, Suchman observed people working with a Xerox photocopier that was designed to be user-friendly. Rather than the follow-the-machine’s-step-by-step-instructions way, users struggled, hesitated and improvised their way through their tasks. The designers had taken a linear, logical route to user interaction, but Suchman’s study indicated that people wean new systems through trial and error, contextual cues, and past usage experience. This illustrated one of the key shortcomings of a traditional usability test: it fails to consider how a user will actually act outside of those environments.
The reading from a few weeks back did a great job reinforcing about Suchman’s idea of “situated action” — the notion that how humans interact with technology is context sensitive, shaped by prior experience and the immediate environment, instead of following clear-cut, defined rules. She critiqued the notion that a good or usable experience could simply be designed in isolation, noting that understanding how technology integrates into people’s real workflows requires observation and ethnographic research. Demonstrating that users make sense of technology in deeply adaptive fashions, she called for design strategies that consider this complexity.
Suchman’s analysis changed the landscape of interaction design, UX research, and AI development by prioritizing human practice over system logic. She revealed that usability is not a checklist of design principles, but something to be observed and iterated upon based on real user behavior. Her work is still seeing resonance, especially in realms like AI, automation and UX design, where systems break down when they fail to consider the unpredictable way in which humans use technology. By prioritising the ways of working of real people over the sometimes rigidly ostensible design of social systems, Suchman redefined what it means for technology to “work” for its users.