Whenever we design a new product or service, it is always imperative to understand who and how will people use it. Without this understanding, there is almost zero chance of creating a product or service that people will love. ‘People ignore design that ignores people’ is a famous quote by Frank Chimero. And this quote perfectly summarizes the importance of a user-centric design. User-centric designs are about gaining a deeper understanding of who will be using the product or service.
Organizations that apply these practices in their design processes focus on the user and create products or services that are aligned with user expectations. The fundamental principle of a user-centric design is that if you gather data from users and incorporate your findings into product or service design, you are more likely to gauge user expectations and further enhance the overall experience.
In this article, you will learn much more about user-centric designs and it’s impact on both — users and organizations.
What is a User-Centric Design?
User-centric Design (UCD) is an optimistic approach to invent new solutions. It starts with human beings and ends with the answers that are tailor-made to their individual needs. When you understand the people you are trying to reach and then design from their perspective, you come up with the most unusual of answers.
UCD is about both, how you are thinking and what you are doing. It is all about:
Ø Empathizing with the individuals you’re designing for
Ø Generating a plethora of ideas and building a bunch of prototypes
Ø Sharing what you’ve created with the people you’re designing for
Ø Failing and trying again
Ø Finally putting your innovative solution out there in the world
It is a collection of processes that focus on putting users at the center of product design and development. When a product team develops digital products, it takes into account the user’s requirements, objectives and feedback. Satisfying user’s needs becomes the topmost priority and every design decision is evaluated in the context of whether it delivers value to the users or not. User-centric design empowers you make an emotional impact through your products or services.
User-Centric Design Principles
User-centric design is based on a few fundamental principles that can be applied for the design process:
▶ Users are involved in the design process from the very beginning
Critical design decisions are evaluated based on how they work for
users.
▶ Importance of requirement clarification
The product team always tries to align business requirements with user’s needs.
▶ Introducing user feedback loop in the product life cycle
The product team collects and analyzes feedback from users regularly. This information helps the team to make more user-focused decisions.
▶ Iterative design process
The product team constantly works on improving user experience. It introduces changes gradually as it gains more understanding about their target audience.
User-centric designers test, fail and keep trying again and again. This method combines analysis, interviews, generative strategies and tools like group action. UCD, for the most part, develops an understanding of the user’s desires through the inclusion of users at all stages of the designing and testing. We rely on feedback from everyone in the group. Iteration keeps the design process responsive.
UCD influences the ultimate success of the product release. Microsoft is one of the best examples of benefiting user-centric design. For a long time, it was a technology-driven organization. Now, the corporation has changed its strategy to be more user-centric. They have adopted an authentic design development process that focuses on users.
Their UX had become more and more advanced, and this was negative for the users. So, Microsoft decided that user-centric design should be a part and parcel of their code. This software giant found hope in team-building and a creative development process. The user-centric design resulted in humongous success. Both the business and user goals were successfully developed by working with high- end users.
Identifying Problems In UX Beforehand
In user-centric design, you have to be comfortable with the idea of failure and celebrate the learning that it brings. You try something out or you learn from an experiment that didn’t reap in desired results. In some ways, the learning that comes from that unexpected failure is more valuable than the success it might have been.
When it comes to implementation, that’s when you don’t want failure to occur because the process starts getting more and more expensive. But even then you need to be constantly experimenting and refining. So with user-centric design, even in case of failure, you continue to prototype and improve your UX. With user-centric design, you will not have avoidable rework or even worse, a big failure right at the end. Because UCD identifies problems before they even emerge.
Impact of UCD
User-centric design has a human bias in its DNA. By beginning with human beings, their hopes, fears and needs, designers tend to discover what’s most desirable. But that’s only one lens through which we get glance at our solutions. Once the designers have come up with the solutions for the target audience, it is time for technical expertise.
They also need to figure out the way to make the solution financially viable. Finding balance is fundamentally crucial to designing solutions that are sustainable and successful.
When the goal is to get the best solutions out into the world, you can’t only bank upon concepts. You have to make sure the solutions are doable, viable and desirable.
User-Centric Design Examples
A few examples of organizations that have benefitted from user-centric desgning have been listed below:
▶ Duolingo
Anyone who has used Duolingo understands the simplicity of the app. By finishing one task or a game, you’ll be able to move on to the more advanced categories. Incorporating characteristics of a mobile gaming app and using it to teach users new languages is a brilliant idea. The amazing UX is what keeps people coming back again and again.
▶ Trello
Trello may be a good example of UX design-it does not have a lot of unnecessary features. Everything on the home screen is easy to understand and works exactly the way it is supposed to. There is no confusion over how to move tasks from one board to another. The interface design is intuitive and people using the app for the first time do not face any kind of setbacks while navigating the pages.
▶ Yelp
In addition to convenient navigation, the Yelp service for online reservation visually displays the number of free tables at any restaurant of choice. The map with it’s location, always remains visible for the convenience of users. The ‘Start Order’ option allows the user to start the order with one click.
▶ Airbnb
With their recent update to book a room instantly, having a mobile presence has become a necessity for Airbnb. Just like their innovative website, their mobile app is easy to navigate. The users enter details about where they want to stay, what dates and how many guests they’re going to have, etc. and they get a variety of homes to choose from, right at their fingertips.
Final Thoughts
The development of a product or service is a journey within itself. The team makes a lot of decisions along the way and the outcome is often defined by those decisions. If we prioritize user expectations and truly strive to create a user-focused design, the journey will end with the most fulfilling results for both-the users and the organizations.
