In my personal opinion, I do not believe that the user is always right. Rather I think it's a little of both, right and wrong. While most users have ideas that they think can improve a product, some of these are very user specific. What I mean is, the idea would really only benefit that person not the entire population of users. For this reason, a designer should never add a design just because one or a few people want it. One must understand that design is a very long process and not everything works, perhaps the designer had already tried that idea. Or perhaps the idea adds benefit in one area but leads to a lot of compromise in other areas. There is definitely a larger "user-centered" focus at play however, if the majority of users wanted one specific idea to be added to their product then designer should work on adding this with minimal disturbance to the product's other features.
In project 2, using a "situation-specific approach" to research would have been extremely beneficial. In this context Hoekman's idea of a "situation specific approach"to research would have involved designing usability tests for a very large group of users on a chosen workout machine. This way we could really have gotten a representative sample of what the typical user needs.
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