User-Centered Design
A user-centered
design process involves the participation of users from
the very first stage of development, and continues to involve users at
each step of the process. The goal of user-centered design is to create a
product that works for the potential users and is well-designed for that
user group.
The first step in this process is to identify the target audience and to
meet with them. By conducting interviews, watching users complete tasks
and listening to them talk about their work, you will find out:
- what the users need
- what their work environment is like
- what is important to them
- what tasks they do both
frequently and infrequently
- how they accomplish these tasks now
- how do they think about their tasks (the mental model)
By understanding the users and their tasks, you will easily devise
scenarios to test your products. You can imagine your users trying to
walk through your product, and you can bring users in frequently to test
your ideas and assumptions. The user-centered design approach is
cost-effective in that prototypes can be developed on paper and tested
before many hours and dollars have been spent developing a product that
doesn't work for the users.
"Throughout the entire development process and beyond, users play a
critical role in the design of easy-to-use products. After all, who knows
more about which products are easy to use than the people who use them?"
--IBM
User-Centered Design website
