User-Centered Design. A must known design approach in this era.
Should we care about users needs on making a product? Let’s learn more about UCD!
What is User-Centered Design? Have you ever heard about it? Are you curious enough to know more about it? Well, here is my understanding about User-Centered Design.
Brief Explanation
“User-centered design emphasizes that the purpose of the system is to serve the user, not to use a specific technology, not to be an elegant piece of programming. The needs of the users should dominate the design of the interface, and the needs of the interface should dominate the design of the rest of the system.”
— Donald A. Norman, 1987
To simplify, User-Centered Design (UCD) is a design approach on making product that will fulfill users needs using any technology that available on this world. But, on making a product, users needs are not the only determiner, although they influence decisions made for aesthetics, architecture, ergonomics, etc.
In computer science field, UCD can be described as design approach to making a software/hardware based on users needs, and the technology can be a website, a mobile app, a desktop app, etc.
Basic steps
Before product released:
- Observes and interviews users.
- Evaluates the market and competitors.
- Uses all users feedback to determine requirements needed in a product.
- Consult with representative users while waiting for the product to be nearly complete.
- Make revisions to the design while the users testing out prototypes.
After product released:
- Consults users to make improvements on the product.
- Recruit users to test the applications so that the product can be improved over time.
This process will run endlessly in order to keep the product being relevant to users needs.
User-Centered Design intended to understand and fulfill users needs, but doesn’t mean that users are in control of the design process.
Key elements of UCD
- How user thinks and interacts with a product.
- What the user requires.
- What others have done before to engage users (both bad and good).
- What the company wants to accomplish with the product for it’s intended users.
How is a good UCD?
A good UCD is understanding users, designing a product, doing whatever i takes to make the product works for them, and giving them enough control to manage the system in multiple types of situations.
Persona
Persona is a fictional character that represent the needs of actual user. Persona is often created by placing a photo, a name, personalities, goals, motivations, pain points.
According to Alan Cooper, there are three types of personas: marketing personas, proto-personas, and design personas. On UCD context, our focus is on design personas.
Design personas are about tell a story and describe why people do what they do in attempt to help everyone involved in designing and building a product or service understand, relate to, and remember the end user throughout the entire product development process
— Ilama, 2015
By using design personas, the resulting product will satisfy users needs since everyone that involved on creating the product can relate to the end user. It will also reduce the amount of revision that needed in order to adjust the product to be more relevant with users needs.
How to make persona?
Here are basic steps to create a persona:
Research
Collecting information about your target users. You can collect information from surveys, interviews, web analytics, etc. Information that will be used in making persona should be real in order to get an accurate persona.
Describe User’s Demographic
You can start creating persona by describing your target user’s basic info, you can describe it’s demographic, such as name, photo, age, address, job, etc.
Describe User’s Background
In this section, you need to write about everything you know about your target user’s background. I suggest to avoid writing unnecessary information that may cause confusion on your persona.
Describe User’s Goals
You have to describe your target users goals clearly. User’s goals are the representation of things that user want to accomplish by using a product.
Describe User’s Motivation
Your target users may have some reasons why they want to use a product. By knowing your target user’s motivation, you may get some insight to adjust or add features at your product. Describe your target user’s motivation in a clear and concise words.
Describe User’s Pain Points
Pain points represent problems or difficulties that your target users have. Their pain points are useful for you to create a relevant product or to improve the current product. Describe your target users pain points in details at the persona.
Describe Additional Information
At this section, you can add some additional information about your target users, such as personality trait, character, etc.
Key Elements
- Demographic : Name, photo, age, address, job, etc.
- Goals : Things that users want to accomplish.
- Motivation : Users reason to accomplish things at the goals.
- Pain points : Users difficulty on the current available products.
Example
Me and my team get a chance to build a document searcher using GDrive API. Here is the persona that we create according to the users interview.
From the persona above, we can see that users of this application will be software engineers with ambitious, practical, and generous personalities. Then, we can see too that users have goals, motivations, and pain points.
In my opinion, this persona is great because it gives me all important information that my group need. For example, by looking at the pain points section, I can tell that he needed a faster and relevant search engine for finding his documents so that he can increase his productivity.
My attempt to help user’s pain points
We are making a contextual document searcher to search documents in google drive using meilisearch as the search engine.
First of all, to create a contextual document searcher, we should have the data and the engine. I create an integration between our application with google drive API so that my application will fetching documents data from google drive API and insert it into the meilisearch engine. Then, i’ll do the search on meilisearch engine to retrive the document based on the keyword that given by the user.
To conclude, User-Centered Design is one of the best approach that we can used to build a product which relevant to the end users needs and persona can be used as a way to accomplish the intended product that designed by using UCD approach.
References
- Fundamentals of User-Centered Design. A practical approach. (Brian Still and Kate Crane)
- User Experience Innovation. User Centered Design That Works. (Christian Kraft)
- The Elements of User Experience. (Jesse James Garrett)
- The Design of Everyday Things. (Don Norman)
