What’s User Centered Design? Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF)

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What’s User Centered Design?

User-centered design (UCD) is definitely an iterative design process by which designers concentrate on the users as well as their needs in every phase from the design process. In UCD, design teams involve users through the design process via a number of research and style techniques, to produce highly functional and accessible products on their behalf.

UCD is definitely an Iterative Process

In user-centered design, designers use a combination of investigative methods and tools (e.g., surveys and interviews) and generative ones (e.g., brainstorming) to build up an awareness of user needs.


Observe how to use user-centered design here.

Generally, each iteration from the UCD approach involves four distinct phases. First, as designers employed in teams, we attempt to know the context by which users could use a method. Then, we identify and specify the users’ needs. A design phase follows, where the design team develops solutions. They then proceeds for an evaluation phase. Here, you measure the connection between the evaluation from the users’ context and needs, to check on how good a design has been doing. More particularly, the thing is how close it’s to an amount that suits the users’ specific context and satisfies all their relevant needs. Came from here, your team makes further iterations of those four phases, and also you continue before the evaluation answers are acceptable.

User-centered design is definitely an iterative procedure that concentrates on an awareness from the users as well as their context in most stages of development and design.

UCD Views the entire Consumer Experience

In UCD, you base work upon an explicit knowledge of you, tasks and environments. The purpose of the operation is to capture and address the whole consumer experience. Therefore, your design team will include professionals from across multiple disciplines (e.g., ethnographers, psychologists, hardware and software engineers), in addition to domain experts, stakeholders and also the users themselves. Experts may execute evaluations from the created designs, using design guidelines and criteria. However, you need to bear two crucial points in your mind. First, to span the whole consumer experience, you have to involve you for evaluation. Second, you will need to ensure lengthy-term monitoring useful.

Purchase of UCD Takes care of

Whenever your design team brings you into every stage from the design process, you invest your energy along with other sources right into a effective method of discovering the things that work well, what doesn’t and why. Your users are an earlier-warning system will course-correct and fine-tune your design. They are able to expose many aspects—positive and negative—your team might have overlooked regarding such vital areas as usability and ease of access. That is why it’s essential to know how effective the advantages of a person-centered design approach are.

“;Being human-centred is the one other cost to the project, so companies appropriately ask whether taking a lot time to speak to people, produce prototype designs and so forth is useful. The reply is a simple ‘yes’.”

— David Benyon, Professor with more than twenty five years of experience of HCI

David Benyon distinguishes four ways that UCD takes care of:

  1. With close user participation, products are more inclined to meet users’ expectations and needs. This can lead to elevated sales minimizing costs suffered by customer services.
  2. Systems designers tailor products for individuals in specific contexts with specific tasks, therefore reducing the likelihood of situations with a bad risk of human error arising. UCD results in safer products.
  3. Putting designers in close connection with users means a much deeper feeling of empathy emerges. This really is crucial in creating ethical designs that respect privacy and the caliber of existence.
  4. By concentrating on all users of the product, designers can recognize the variety of cultures and human values through UCD – one step within the right direction towards creating sustainable companies.

Find out more about User-Centered Design

Read much more about user-centered design from Professor David Benyon in the book Designing Interactive Systems An Extensive Help guide to HCI, UX and Interaction Design.

UXmastery.com has produced a summary of techniques which you can use inside a UX design process. Most of them can help you place the user center stage inside your project.

Resourse:https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/user-centered-design

Basics of Interaction Design