User-Centered Design
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User-centered design (UCD) contributes to successful development efforts because it has an impact on all phases of product development, including post-product release. UCD can:
- Contribute to effective cross-departmental communication and teamwork—UCD methods require members from all departments and domains within an organization to act as stakeholders, share insights and ideas, understand new points of view, and respect strengths and constraints of other team members.
- Ensure better definition of product requirements—Products frequently fail or under-perform because real user needs have not been identified. Engagement with users from initial concept through product release prevents designers and developers from overlooking or misinterpreting critical requirements.
- Reduce development costs—Intensive engagement with users—learning what they need and how they work—speeds design decision-making, prevents false starts, and minimizes costly redesigns.
- Contain support costs—Products and accompanying documentation created with UCD reduce the number, length, and severity of customer support calls.
- Improve user satisfaction—Products, including websites, that create a positive user experience are easier to use and inherently more satisfying. Because these products enable users to achieve their goals more easily, users prefer them and report increased satisfaction.
- Provide a competitive advantage—As technologies and products mature and converge, often offering comparable features, superior user experience and usability distinguish your products from others with similar functionality. User satisfaction is a prime component of brand recognition and loyalty and encourages customers to try new products with the same brand.
When to Choose This Method
User-centered design can be applied in some form to any design and development effort. Even limited user-centered design activities can have a significant impact on product development efforts, mainly in two areas: by reducing development costs and by improving product acceptance rates. UCD methods and activities can be adapted to fit the needs of an organization or a project. They will be most useful and successful for organizations that embrace the philosophy that users are partners and stakeholders in product development.
What You Can Learn From This Method
The development cycle for any product, such as a software or web application, consists of several distinct phases. Each phase has corresponding user-centered design practices that ensure user input to and validation of deliverables associated with each phase.
During early phases of exploring concept and feasibility, user-centered design activities can help you explore opportunities and unmet user needs such as:
- Current processes and shortcomings of those processes
- Overt and unstated user goals and objectives
- Opinions about competitive products and services
METHODS: focus groups, ethnographic interviews
During phases focusing on goal definition and requirements gathering, user-centered design activities can help you identify a comprehensive list of requirements such as:
- Key tasks, daily tasks, and rarely performed but necessary tasks
- Task contexts, constraints, safety issues, required knowledge and skills, and attitudes towards tasks
- “Nice-to-have” features and functions
- User environments (physical, organizational, social, and so forth)
METHODS: Contextual inquiry, ethnographic interviews, task analysis
During design, development, and implementation phases, user-centered design activities ensure that you develop product components that meet both user requirements and business goals, such as:
- Information structures and product views
- Task flows
- Features to support task completion (such as navigation elements)
- Labels
- Outputs or results
- User assistance
METHODS: Exploratory (formative) usability testing with low-fidelity prototypes, rapid iterative testing, heuristic evaluation
In testing, release, and maintenance phases, user-centered design activities ensure that the product or service usability meets or exceeds acceptance criteria when measured according to agreed-on metrics. They can also explore features and usability issues to be addressed in the next release. During these phases, user-centered design efforts can explore:
- User acceptance of key product elements and functions
- Task success or failure
- Real-time product use statistics
- New or unpredicted patterns of product use
- Improvements or enhancements for future releases
- Needs or desires for new or related products
METHODS: Performance (summative) usability testing, mining of call center and web server logs, field usability testing
By providing this information, user-centered design drives subsequent product development and business growth.
