Feb 4

Feb 4 User-Centered Design: Put Your Users First

In a sentence, user-centered design is the process that focuses on the users and their needs while involves them throughout the design process.

Can you apply user-centered design both to physical and digital products? Absolutely. You can choose this to be your strategy whatever product or service you’re building.

Are you a writer, writing a book? This process is also for you.

Are you a business owner, do you need to build or update your client on-boarding process?

Are you a manager introducing new software into your company?

The user-centered design will help you bring/build/design highly usable, accessible products, processes, and services. And not only that but it’ll save you the cost of re-designing or re-introducing a product from scratch.

The process doesn’t guarantee a free from error product, but it does help you to create something that users can use at the first trial. As designers or business owners we want to meet our users’ expectations, we want to consider the user requirements. Or there will be no (great) product.

Here’s what you need to consider:

Who is this product for and what problem does it solve? Go back to your product design days and remember: what was that market opportunity you saw? For who are you designing this solution? Clearly define the user and the problem. When you’re designing your personas, don’t forget to meet them where they are at. Try to understand their behaviour, what drives them, and how they can accomplish what they want to accomplish by using your product. What do they expect from a coffee machine? What do they expect from your e-commerce site? What do they expect from a glass bottle? So, decide first who they are and what their mental models are. We all have very specific mental models and we all expect a set of things based on our past experiences, cultural background, and lifestyle to name a few.
Many technology companies try to sound too innovative but wind up creating confusion when presenting their product. A lot of weight is put on looking edgy and cool but think about it: Are you trying to sell your services? Are you trying to attract investors? Or are you trying to attract young talent? You see where this goes. Who is this product for?
What’s your customer’s journey like? That’s when we visualise how our users are interacting with the product we are creating. User experience mapping is the user experience from the user’s perspective. How will our product be used in the real world? Think of a busy HR manager looking for catering services. How much time do they have to search and scroll through a catering service website? Are they in the office when they visit your website? Do you make it easy for them to find the solution you’re offering? Do they need a long parallax effect, do they need website sound? Will it add to their experience to add animations or music to your design? Will it help them to make the decision to buy what you’re selling? Understand the context.
Involve the users early on. Talk to people. Talk to people that fit your users’ profile. What do they need? What do they expect from a product like yours? Ask them to use your prototype, read your draft, your unfinished book, use your work-in-progress website. You don’t need a fancy system to involve users and get feedback. Invite people to observe and watch them interact with the product. It can be family members, a small group of users, or clients. Look for behaviours, don’t focus on opinions. Note down the opinions but focus more on the way they interact. What’s working, what’s not.
Check your product again, check the solution you’re offering. Does it satisfy user needs, expectations, and requirements? Is it fast enough? Is it what they are expecting? Is there anything you have overlooked? Designers use a mix of methods, investigative (e.g. interviews, surveys) and generative (think of brainstorming) to try and understand what the users need. It can often be very challenging to understand user requirements, especially when designing more complex systems. There you’ll need to invest in larger-scale usability testing, maybe follow an iterative prototyping process, conduct surveys, especially if you need to reach a very large audience and you need to understand the characteristics, behaviors, and attitudes of that large audience. But the process is the same, ask your user, work with your user in mind.