I'm going to tell you a little story (poetic license has been used in the story - and for those HCI boffins, yes this is a "scenario of use" and yes, the "persona" Alison is based on my experiences...).
The other week Alison walked to uni in the middle of a thunderstorm. It came on all of a sudden and she was caught out a bit. She did not have a hat or an umbrella and ended up getting very wet. Alison's hair was soaked through and her jeans were soaked too. Alison arrived at uni feeling fairly unhappy and miserable.
Alison wanted to dry off before she taught her 9.15 class, in the old department building she used to dry herself by going to the bathroom and standing under the hand dryers for a few minutes. So, Alison went to the bathroom in the new building and realised that the new design of hand dryers does not easily allow her to dry her hair or trousers (the latter she would only be able to dry if she removed the item, which did not seem appropriate). Alison could not dry herself, and went to teach her class in a horrid mood and set lots of nasty homework for the students. Eventually Alison dried off and felt a bit better, but by the end of the day Alison had started to develop a nasty cold, possibly as a result of standing around wet for a couple of hours.
As stories go I appreciate this wasn't thrilling... but it illustrates the point (as a scenario should!). Although a hand dryer's primary objective (and the user's primary goal) is to dry hands (well.. d'uh) and the new fancy hand dryers do this more effectively, efficiently and ecologically than the old ones (or so I'm told - that's why they were installed!) the secondary objective of allowing the user to dry other things cannot be achieved with the new design.
Is this a problem? Well, for Alison, it was very annoying as she had to wander around with wet trousers and wet hair until it dried naturally. The end of the scenario tells us that Alison developed a nasty cold. Are these two things related? Well, that can't be proved, but I don't think it helped... However, Alison's mood in the class was certainly affected be the product's inability to meet her secondary goal.
But, do the ecological benefits of the new design outweigh her irritation at not being able to dry herself? Quite possibly. It might be the case that the designers of the new system were aware that their new design no longer allowed users to use the product in all the ways that they traditionally did. The designers may well have decided that, on balance, the ecological benefits were sufficiently superior that it didn't matter that people will, occasionally, wander around with wet hair and wet trousers. Or perhaps they didn't actually fully consider the requirements/objectives of the existing system and overlooked this element of functionality.
Are secondary goals important? Well, that's entirely context driven and depends upon what the user expects. As it happens, Alison did not pay for the hand dryers (well not directly) and was not involved in the design. Alison will not stop using the hand dryers to dry her hands because of it, and the ecological benefits (probably leading to economic benefits) to the company that paid for the hand dryers will probably outweigh the fact that Alison got annoyed, so I suspect this secondary goal (and the fact that the new design does not fulfil it) will not affect sales of the product in the future.
BUT, some products will have unintended secondary uses that do impact on sales volume if the user cannot see a way of achieving this functionality. When designing products, with a user focus (as all products should be designed!) it is imperative to think about the user's secondary or alternative goals, particularly if the product will be used as a replacement to an existing technology, otherwise not supporting this activity could result in the product being somewhat useless to a large number of potential customers.
Please comment if you can think of any other products that have secondary goals/uses that are no longer supported. I will put up a photo of the new dryers when i get a mo...
