The user centered design, UCD, process puts the user’s needs, wants and limitations in focus throughout the whole development phase. The result is a product that offers a more efficient, satisfying and friendly experience for the user. An important criteria for success is for all development projects to use the UCD, but also do it in the right order. That is why we now emphasize the importance for performing the UCD in a proper discovery process ahead of the main bulk of programming continues. The process can seem time consuming, but don’t be discouraged, this work is pure investment and does not need to be as time consuming as it looks like.
The discovery phase, with the UCD process at its core, contains four steps and is an iterative process. In the different steps of the UCD process different methods can and should be used, depending on needs and scope.
The illustrations below shows how the discovery process with the UCD preceeds development and examples of different methods for each step of the process. We will describe what each step means and also a couple of methods per step that can be used.
Understand user context
The most important step of the process is to understand the user context. If you don’t know who the users are nor understand the environment they use the application in, it is impossible to develop a user-friendly product. This step is used to gather facts about how the users think and behave, rather than rely on opinion and speculation. The goal with this step is to get increased understanding in:
- Who are the users?
- In what environment/situation do they use the application?
- Which goals shall the application help the user to achieve?
- What demands must the application fulfill to satisfy the user?
- Which problems does the user encounter when working in the application?
The best method to use to answer the questions above is to observe the users in their real environment, that is visit the users at their workplace and see them perform their daily work. This method is called user observations.
An illustration of Visma’s UCD process:
Specify demands
To specify demands is about making findings from the previous step in the process concrete. This is the phase where you document the issues; summarize, analyse and compare the results. At this point you set the foundation for the next conceptual step, to develop concepts.
Initially, you may want to create personas describing and personifying your typical users. After you can create scenarios for each persona to communicate why will a person use an application to achieve a goal or solve a task, or make a customer journey map to visualize the journey of a user.
One of the methods that can be used to summarize, analyze and compare the results is a UX priority list.
Develop concept
This is the creative step where you get the chance to explore new ideas. It is a fun and exciting part of the process where your ideas come alive.
Prototyping is an essential tool in this step. Two valuable methods are paper prototyping and Balsamiq prototyping.
Evaluate concept
In order to quality assure your prototype and concept you must evaluate it against the demands and with users. The idea is to find areas of improvement when evaluating and go back to develop and refine the concept further. This is an easy, effective and cheap way to make sure your concept is quality assured before implementing a single line of code.
The most valuable method for evaluating a concept is user tests. This method can also be used to test an implementation. System Usability Score is another method that can be used to evaluate a product. This can however not be used to evaluate concepts, only released versions of a product. It also has the limitation of testing only the usability of a product not the other three parts that make up a good user experience in the UX pyramid.
Iterate until you no longer find any comprehensive flaws in your concept. You can often notice this when all or most users find the same minor problems.
