UCD and UX are the two most common and confusing words. Designing for users is critical for the success of the app as well as the brand. UX stands for User Experience and UCD stands for User-Centered Design. UX is when designers design for the overall user experience of an app, whereas UCD is the approach that designers take while working for UX.
Imagine you want to bake the perfect cake for your friend’s birthday. To do that, you wouldn’t just throw random ingredients together and hope for the best. Instead, you’d follow a recipe, taste the batter along the way, and adjust it until it’s just right. In the same way, UCD is a method for creating products, like websites or apps, that people love to use.
What is UCD?
User-centered design is a design approach that primarily focuses on the research, data collection, ideation, design, and development of an app. The user-centered design process, strategy, and approach are combined with other UX strategies that combine to solve the problem.
There are a few stages involved in the UCD process such as:
- Research & Analysis
- Ideation on concept and strategy
- Design
- Development
- Usability Testing
These stages are all interrelated and iterative. Once the process of user-centered design starts it keeps on iterating over and over again until the desired and expected results are found.
How to implement the UCD process?
Generally, the UCD approach involves 4 steps, which typically start from understanding the context of the problem and evaluating the designs. Let’s understand each step in detail:
- Understanding context of use: The primary step is to understand the problem as well the context in which the product that is being designed later would be used. How the product would solve the problem. Learning about the users and their problems would mark the first step of the user-centered design process.
- Specifying user requirements: Once the big picture is clear about what is the problem and what is to be designed, now it’s time to understand the requirements that need to be fulfilled to make the product succeed. What users want and expect from the product is essential to be known. Through surveys and user interviews, designers would get to know about the key user’s requirements. Based on the user requirement, a design strategy is created. This is a plan of how to proceed further looking into all the nitty-gritty of the whole process.
- Ideating and designing solution: After all the data is collected and evaluated, the team proceeds to work on the ideation. New ideas are explored, discussed, and carried out along with cross-functional teams to check on the feasibility and timelines. This way collaboration and communication help keep everyone aligned on the work. A lot of different ideas are explored and based on alignment and discussion, a single idea is taken up for further design.
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Evaluation against Requirements: Evaluation is of utmost importance to check whether the app/product is fulfilling the requirement. A usability test is also carried out with the user to check the:
- Does the product/app meet user requirement
- Does the app have the expected behavior
- Is everything aligned with the user’s mental model
- Is the user able to navigate and interact with the app/product
ISO Standard Definition of UCD
ISO stands for International Organisation for Standards, which released ISO – 13407 in 1999 that is for UCD. According to ISO standards UCD is defined as – “The active involvement of the user and a clear understanding of the user and task requirement along with an appropriate allocation of functions between user and technology carried out as the iteration of design solution known as multi-disciplinary design.” As per the current standard and update of the ISO standard definition now also focuses on – user understanding, user tasks, and environments, validation testing with users,s and developing design while encompassing the whole user experience.
ISO standard definition is something that is now being used as a benchmarking definition to follow the UCD approach. To understand every element of the ISO standard definition, let’s look into these elements in detail.
Element of UCD – based on ISO Standard
From the ISO standard definition, there are 7 different elements around which the whole UCD revolves. Understanding each step would help designers to use the UCD approach more appropriately and positively.
1. Active Involvement of User
It says to have active user involvement during the design process. Taking user input from the beginning, and using those inputs to validate the design would make the design robust and easier for users to relate with.
Active involvement means when you involve users in an iterative, interactive process at every single stage of the complete design cycle.
While planning to actively involve users in the process, keep in mind:
- Technique: By technique, here it means – User interviews, data gathering, usability testing, surveys, and contextual inquiry. All these techniques could be used to get user inputs during the complete design process.
- Purpose: By purpose, it means to say when are we collecting data and for what. Such as – collecting data to understand users’ needs, behavior, and expectations, as well as collecting user data both quantitative and qualitative data collected to measure usability criteria.
- Stage of Design Cycle: At what stage of the design cycle are you going to apply a certain technique to collect data for a particular purpose? Like the midpoint of the design cycle, the start of the process, or the end of the process.
Combining all three 3 steps, the designer first selects a technique(i.e. User interview) for the purpose(i.e. collecting user’s needs and expectation data) during the stage(i.e. beginning of the process).
The idea is to pay attention to – What users do, rather than what they say!
2. Clear Understanding of User Requirements, Tasks, and Environment
Getting a clear understanding of the user’s requirements, what task they’ll perform to meet those requirements and in what environment will those tasks be performed. All this information would come from the previous step, which is purely dedicated to getting the user information through different techniques.
- Requirement: This would include all the key needs of the user, for which they’ll use the product. Knowing the requirement would help designers to think is a way of solving the core issue. Key needs of the user when catered properly, would increase the chances of users sticking to the app and the app being more useful to them.
- Task: Task Bucks included all the core tasks that a user would be performing to meet the end goal. For example, a user needs to shop for a product, to do so he/she needs to select the product, add it to the cart, proceed to buy, select an address, and make the payment. All these tasks would fall under the bucket of core tasks required to be performed to achieve the end goal.
- Environment: Getting to know about the environment is also an important input for designers. Knowing where the user would perform core key actions would add a lot of value to the end product. For example, Google Maps – users would mainly use maps while on the go. So it is very important to understand how users would manage the app, the vehicle, and the directions at the same time. Showing only the relevant element on the interface is crucial, other than too much information would hinder the chance of users to effectively use the app. Therefore only directions are shown on the app while the user is in the navigation mode.
3. Allocation of function between User and Technology
By saying the appropriate allocation of function, it means to say be mindful of the fact that what actions would be best suitable to be performed by whom?
Designers should evaluate what action is better performed by whom, this would avoid the clash between machine and human interaction. For example: While using Microsoft team, the best thing a user could do is set his/her calendar as per how they want their day to be. What a machine or technology could do better is find a common slot for meetings. Now if we compare both scenarios and reverse them concerning who is doing it, it would be messy. Why?
Because a machine can’t plan your day, better than you. Also, you can’t sit and find a free slot for a meeting when inviting 100 people to the meeting.
This is what the allocation of function between user and technology meets, it seems a small point but is very crucial for designers to deeply understand.
4. Iteration of Design Solution
Almost every designer is aware of the fact that design is an iterative process. The whole idea seems very easy but when it comes to implementing the whole iteration concept it is very difficult. Picking the right requirements, flaws to work on, updates to be made and features/functionality to be added before getting started with iteration would be very helpful as it will save a lot of time and effort. Getting started with iteration without anything to work on would waste a lot of time. Including the stakeholders and users before and after each iteration would also help validate the changes.
5. Validation Testing with User
Validation of the designs would be based on the iteration carried out till now. Every iteration should be thorough. Validation includes testing with low-fidelity, high-fidelity as well as the final designs. Whenever the team thinks, iteration and work are 80% done, try to start validating what has been done already.
Always take a go-ahead from your actual user – not through a word but the way they interact with the app would be a sign for you to either work more on the same design as an iteration or that it for the final updates before launching.
6. Multi-Disciplinary Design
By saying a multi-disciplinary design, it means including people from all the other dependent cross-functional teams as well. Including teams that are co-dependent would add a lot of value to the product. Before launching, whenever designs are tested, add developer and product to check the feasibility and accessibility of the feature. For example when thinking of a new feature, have a word with developers concerning time, effort, and the possibility of having that feature in the product.
Cross-functional teams that the designer should be actively involved in during the design process are:
- Engineering
- Visual/communication design
- Marketing & Brand
- Operations
- Copywriters
- Content strategist
Involving the team in the process at the right time would help designers explore crucial use cases, brand identity, and market standards before launching the product.
7. Encompasses the Whole User Experience
Designing while keeping in mind the complete user experience involves, encompassing all channels with which the user interacts. There are many channels of a product through which the user interacts, and by encompassing the whole user experience it means that there should be a maintained consistency for each channel.
For example, Amazon is a big brand that encompasses a lot of products like the Amazon shopping app, Amazon Music app, Amazon Prime Video, and Amazon Alexa, etc. All these products are different touch points with which the audience/user of Amazon interacts.
All these channels maintain consistency and one unique brand identity of Amazon. This is what a designer as well as the whole design team should think while working on products associated with a brand.
Why is UCD Important?
User-centered design is an approach that is important for all, not just the designer.
- For users, it is a chance to check whether a product can solve their problem and get them what they need.
- For designers, it is an approach that is used to put the user front and center, understand users’ requirements, and work on a product to fulfill user needs.
- For developers, it determines the success or failure of the product based on how users are interacting with the app.
- For the product, it determines the product’s market value based on metrics like conversion rates impressions, etc.
- For stakeholders, UCD saves time, cost, and effort.
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Conclusion
At the end of the article, with the closing word as designer UCD is very crucial to be implemented appropriately. It talks about 4 basic things that are utmost necessary to implement UCD – Consider users as a priority, put them in front and center, prioritize their feedback, Think rationally, and evaluate based on the inputs collected through research.