Some time ago we detailed the first steps to start including User-Centered Design in your software development process, presenting to you the most easy-to-integrate techniques, but there is more than that if you want to get the best out of User-Centered Design
User research
Doing user research is the core of User-Centered design because it's the best way to understand the user goals, needs and context. It's hard to integrate it into a company's design & development process, but once you get started paying attention to your application's users, guidelines are not enough: you need to know better your audience, and the best way to do it is through a research process.
- Ethnographic Interviews:
- explore your user's world from an anthropologic point of view. Make interviews registering the context around them, so you can learn about their daily life, how they use their workspace, their problems and needs, how they think about technology, how they use similar and related products. It's very enlightening to learn about real problems of your potential users, once you have do it, you'll probably start thinking in possible solutions and design directions. But first you need to systematize what you've learned
- Personas construction:
- summarizing what you've learned in Personas will help you to communicate easier your findings about your potential users and their different needs and goals. It's a design tool: all the team can benefit from having fictional users extracted from the interviews. With Personas, people working on the project start talking about well-known characters instead of talking about "the user" without knowing who he is.
- Scenarios building:
- to build an escenario is to put your Personas in action, narrating the situations in which they will use your product. It's a creative task that helps designers to see the process from the user's perspective (with their goals, needs, and context) and to improve it as well. It also helps them to see the big picture and to be focused in the most relevant tasks. This tasks could also be split into user stories to integrate this phase with the scrum process
- Requirements and Use Cases:
- Based on the scenarios you can start extracting the most important requirements and building Use Cases. The main difference with other processes is that you have a clear path to follow based on your research.
- Usability tests:
- once you've designed some screens, you can conduct this kind of tests by asking some potential users to follow a set of predefined tasks in your application or site. You''ll be able to find problems and concerns they might have by observing them while they execute the tasks you asked for. This technique helps you to known better how real users understand your site and what sections of your product needs to be improved or changed.
- Card Sorting:
- This technique can be useful to give an structure to your site that reflects the way your potential users think about it. You simply need to ask them to organize a bunch of labeled post-its, in a way that makes sense to them. Then you can compare the different answers to find coincidences.
- A/B tests:
- A/B tests are useful to optimize a section of your application by testing two or more different design options against a large number of users. Then you can know which one works better by analyzing conversion statistics.
Recommended reading
After this short introduction to User Centered Design, you can keep on learning by reading some of the most important books on this subject
- Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman, is about the philosophy and basic rules of Usability. Actually, Don Norman isn't a designer, he is a psychologist, and the first edition of this book was called "Psychology of Everyday Things" [Amazon]
- Don't Make Me Think, by Steve Krug. Althought it's a bit old, this book explains in a very practical and easy way how to design a site thinking of users. [Amazon]
- About Face 3, by Alan Cooper, is one of the most detailed books about the whole process of designing an usable product. [Amazon]
- Emotional Design, by Don Norman, is a book about how emotions and aesthetics can be part of Usability that is a very rational approach to design. [Amazon]
Staying in touch with the community
It's better if you have someone who can guide you through this process, but... how to know specialists in this area? IxDA is a global community of interaction designers who take care of usability (among other very related subjects like information architecture, interaction design, user experience and accesibility). It has a lot of local branches that organize events and can help you through your process. We are assisting to events organized by IxDA Buenos Aires
If you want to know more about this subject, you could also visit our User Centered Design section.
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