Lucy Suchman’s particularly field research at Xerox PARC, fundamentally altered our approach to measuring whether or not technology serves the needs of users. Designers before Suchman’s research habitually had predicted that the users would manipulate technology in orderly step-by-step action in a fashion that resembled assumed instructions. Suchman’s copier operators field observations, however, isolated that real-world usage is oftentimes messy, situational, and subject to the social intercourse. Her research made popular the idea that technology is best designed with an understanding of how people actually use it, rather than how they are told to by designers. This became the field of human-computer interaction and the theory of situated action, which recognizes that the actions of users are shaped by the world in which they are acting, not by the technology itself. Her work encouraged more people-oriented design approaches so that technology would be smart and responsive to human needs and not require users to conform to preconceived frameworks.