The user is always correct and never correct. The user can only know his or her experience with a product so that the user is correct in his or her mind. However, the user may not be correct to the majority. What is more important than the user's solution is the rationale behind a user's solution. A designer should not get hung up on the feature wants of a few users or features in general but should keep an emphasis on the "larger user-centered focus." A product that is usable to the majority of users is the key that Hoekman is getting at. The difficulty is striking the balance between features and usability because at some point there has to be a trade off. A product designed everybody is designed for nobody, and identifying the key users and the key features to make the product usable for the majority of users is just part of the design process.
A situation-centric approach to research may embody appeasing those in opposition to a design, but in most situations I would suggest that appeasing the majority is the most important task. In the situation of a general gym machine, a user needs to be able to use the machine with little to no direction, usability should be emphasized over features. However, with a specialized gym and a specialized machine, a feature rich product might be more emphasized. While a product that is feature rich isn't necessarily unusable, there is a trade off that will occur to some extent. Situation research helps determine the extent of usability by studying the situations of individual users.
Shadowing in my mind is the gold standard of situational research because the lots of observations can be made on how a user actually uses a product. However, I am unsure on how much the results would have different by shadowing a user rather than asking to complete use cases.
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