Have you ever heard of, “user centered design”? It’s a term coined by Don Norman in the 1980s to describe the design of everyday things. His focus was to design based on the users needs, leaving aside any arbitrary elements. Having an understanding of user centered design is imperative to running a successful business. By designing products and services with the end user in mind, you’re more likely to be on target when launching/running your business. With that said, let’s cover how user centered design builds business success.
What is User Centered Design?
According to usability.gov, the user centered design process outlines the phases throughout a design and development life-cycle all while focusing on gaining a deep understanding of who will be using the product. This process breaks down into four steps that help you design based on explicit understanding of users, tasks, and environments that are refined by user-centered evaluation.
User Centered Design Process
- Context: Identify the people who will use your product and/or service, what they will use it for, and under what conditions.
- Requirements: Identify business and user goal benchmarks that represent the core of your product.
- Design Solution: Design a solution that meets the previous requirements, completed through stages from rough concept to final product.
- Evaluation: Test your solution with actual users to gauge your success and make any necessary improvements.
Context of Use
The objective of context is to establish the who, what, where, and why of the product you are offering. This is vitally important to the success of your product and business. If a product is created without defining the context, there’s no clear indication that it will be helpful to the end user. Businesses thrive on solving a problem and by not solving the problem correctly, it’s more likely to fail. Let’s break this down and cover a few examples.
- Who: Define who your user is and be specific! Vague descriptions will not help during product design. I recommend creating a persona of your ideal user and cater your efforts towards designing a solution for that person.
- What: Define what people will use your product for. For instance, a product might help someone grow their social media following, get from point A to point B, become a better cook, or any number of possibilities!
- Where: It’s important to consider the conditions surrounding the use of your product. Take Facebook for example. Research showed that mobile usage was steadily growing over time and so they optimized their product as a mobile application. Imagine if they hadn’t done this, we would most likely have a repeat of Myspace.
- Why: It’s crucial to define why someone would use your product/service. What problem do they have that your product will solve? Another thing to consider is why they should choose your product over another similar offering. Solve your users problems, differentiate from competitors, and your business will be that much more successful.
By establishing this information first, you’re much more likely to see success from your product offerings. As an afterthought, this information might cause time intensive, costly updates to your product. Imagine building a house without a blueprint, doesn’t really make sense, right? Build your contextual runway and you’ll be able to fly!
Requirements
To build a successful product, one must consider both the business and user requirements. Obviously, the product needs to fill a customers need, but the company needs certain things to remain in business. This will result in a number of give-and-take scenarios. For example, let’s say you run a website that gives away amazing free content. It’s informative, actionable, and packed with life changing material. Well, at some point, you will need something in return from your users. This usually starts as an email request and eventually turns into a product offering. This makes sense because if someone finds your content useful, they may find your premium product very helpful. Anytime you request information from your users, the user experience may suffer, but it’s just the nature of business. Let’s run an example of a real estate business’ needs vs it’s user base.
Example Real Estate Business
User Needs
- Ability to search available homes
- Information about buying a home
- Information about selling a home
- Available realtors and specific contact information
- Neighborhood/school district information
- General contact information
Business Needs
- Require system to record name, email, and phone number
- System requires email address to contact us
- Email subscription pop-up before leaving page
- Requires email automation follow-up after subscription
These are just a few general requirements a website may request. Take into account the context of your own user base and create a list of specific requirements that fit both your needs.
Design Solution
With solid context, user, and business requirements in hand, an informed design solution can be made. The design process should start as rough concepts and tested early to find any potential issues. In application design they go by the saying, test early and test often. This mantra can be applied to more than application design because it works. With continual testing on a regular basis, you’re sure to find any issues that may arise. This will save a lot of time and money in the end. It’s much easier to fix a product in the early stages of development than to make changes after it’s complete. With that said, here’s a general run-down of the design process
General Design Process
- Define: In the beginning stages, it’s important to keep the problem in mind, your ideal customer, and user & business requirements.
- Ideate: Here’s where you brainstorm and create a number of concepts. Drawing, sketching, diagrams, low fidelity mockups, anything that’ll help move things in the right direction.
- Prototype: After the ideation phase, you can take your best concept to hi fidelity. During this phase, and even the ideation phase, it’s important to continue testing with your ideal user base. This ensure you stay on track while moving forward.
- Build: Now that you have defined a problem, stated user and business requirements, brainstormed a number of solutions, and created a well tested prototype, it’s time to build it!
- Analyze: Completing a product is a great accomplishment, but it doesn’t mean you’re done. At this point, further analyzation will show how your customers react to your product. From this information, you can continue improving what you have to offer.
Let’s run a quick example of someone who wants to create their own business website using WordPress. They purchase a web hosting service, download a great theme, and are up and running in just a few minutes… but that doesn’t mean it’s designed well for their user base. That WordPress theme looks great and functions well to the site owner, but the ideal user is left as an afterthought. Instead, the site owner should take user context and user/business requirements, pick a theme, and make customizations that align with both user and business goals.
Evaluation:
After creating an initial product, you then have the opportunity to evaluate your solution in the real world. Sure, testing was done along the way, but you can now take a deep, analytical look to see if it’s working as you intended. The following provide a number of ways to evaluate your product:
- Focus Groups
- Usability Testing
- Questionnaires
- Online Polls
- Reviews
- Email/Social Media Feedback
These are just a few ways to evaluate the success of your product. The point of evaluating the effectiveness of your product is to discover any opportunities for improvement. Many products need further improvement, take for example vehicle recalls! Just remember to keep your users best interest in mind and improve your products based off their feedback.
Achieving Business Success
As I’m sure you can tell by now, user centered design is huge when it comes to business success! Designing products with a focus on the end user will not only provide a solution to their needs, but provide a solid foundation for business success. There are a number of businesses out there, but which ones do you find yourself returning to?….the ones who put customers first.
Designing your own product/service/website/application? Leave any questions or comments below on your progress!
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