I didn’t feel like creating an account at the Peachpit site, so here goes…

I think it’s safe to say that most of us lack the time to create deeply thorough and insightful user profiles. Which leaves us with personas based on our best guess which don’t end up truly influencing the end design or serving more purpose than reminding us to “keep the user in mind”. And who has worked with a project yet that was targeting just ONE user group? And of course, users can’t tell us what they want, or how they will really use an interface. So we’re challenged with trying to create an appealing, useful experience across multiple audiences and doing a lot of feature juggling in the process.

With all that I really see the benefit of using the activity as the guide, rather than this imaginary user.

Whatever provides more reliable information and a more defined set of requirements with which to determine what features really belong, sounds better to me.

Your part 3 / 3 is online!
I read it a few days ago.

I also read “Solve for the moment” http://rhjr.net/theblog/2007/11/05/solve-for-the-moment/

How do you see designing one or more activities (each of them consisting of a series of moments) compared to designing an experience (ie. the Rambo website movies.break.com/rambo/)
and what would be the position of ABCD or UCD in those design processes?