User Centered Design

User-Centered Design
TOPIC COVERED
• People have “mental models” of how things work, built
from
• affordances
• Causality (cause and effect)
• constraints
• mapping
• positive transfer
• population stereotypes/cultural standards
• instructions
• interactions
Human Computer Interaction and Design
• Rather than the traditional design models adopted within
software engineering which are characterized by their
linearity. HCI has adopted a design model which aspires to
incorporate the following premises:
* user centered
* multi disciplinary
* highly iterative
What is User centered
• What is User Experience?

• What is Design?
• What is User-Centered Design?
• What do designers do?
• What is our design process?
• How to take it home
What is User Experience (UX)?
• User Experience is the sum experience of a user interacting with a

product.
What is Design?
• The aim of design is to create good user experiences.

What is Design?
• Design is a craft – an artistic science – that melds technology and

humanity
What is User-Centered Design (UCD)?
• The user is put in the center of the design
Why UCD/UX?
• Increased customer satisfaction

• Increased user productivity/efficiency/accuracy
• Increased service/site usage and adoption
• Decreased support and training costs
• Reduced development time and costs
• Create only the features users need
• Reduced maintenance costs
• Do it right the first time
What do designers do?
• User Research
• Usability Analysis
• Information Architecture
• Interaction Design
• User Interface Design
• Visual/Graphic Design
What is our design process?
1. User Needs Assessment

2. Competitive/Comparative Analysis
3. Heuristic Evaluation
4. Personas
5. Goals, Tasks & Scenarios
6. Design Concepts
7. User Testing
1. User Needs Assessment
• Surveys
• Interviews
• Focus groups
• Advanced observation techniques
• Field studies
• Contextual inquiries
• Ethnography(depth study by observation)
2. Competitive/Comparative Analysis
• Try using similar services or products in order to find out:

• Current trends in the marketplace
• What expectations your users will have
• What to do, what not to do
• Interface conventions
• “Must have” standard features
• Evaluate an existing interface (or new interface concept) based on set
of usability criteria
• Mostly used to highlight usability problems and deficiencies
• May or may not propose usability solutions
• Identified problem areas are addressed by subsequent design work
• Normally done with expert evaluators, but it can be a valuable tool for
anyone
• Visibility of system status
• Match between the system and the real world
• User control and freedom
• Consistency and standards
• Error prevention
• Recognition rather than recall
• Flexibility and efficiency of use
• Aesthetic and minimalist design
• Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
• Help and documentation
4. Personas
• Models of “archetypical” users culled from user research
• Each persona is a description of one particular “typical” user
of your system
• Personas may be combined if they have the same (or
sometimes overlapping) goals
• Be specific, make them real
• Pictures, posters
• Include details about their life—humanize them
• Places the focus on specific users rather than on "everyone”
• Helps avoid “the elastic user”
5. Goals, Tasks & Scenarios
• Goals:
• Are what the user wants to do, but not how the user achieves
them
• Tasks:
• Describe the steps necessary to achieve the goals
• Can vary with the available technology
• Are broken down into steps for task analysis, and are recombined
into sequence of steps for scenario development
• Designers can reorganize, combine, or remove tasks currently
performed to help users achieve their goals more efficiently
• Scenarios:
• Written description of a persona achieving a goal through a set of
tasks in a specific context
• Should start technology-neutral and become more specific as the
design progresses
6. Design Concepts
• Start rough
• Explore!
• Use personas to keep the Design
users in view Prototype
• Use scenarios to inform the
design
• Get frequent feedback
• Note user conventions
• Make design artifacts public Evaluate
• May be expressed in a
prototype for usability
testing
Image courtesy of James Landay
6. User Testing
• Let users validate or invalidate the design

• Ask the user to complete selected typical tasks (from scenarios)
and think aloud while they do it
• Test early in the process
• Can test with 3-5 users (or less!)
• “Formal” testing
• Measures “success”
• Set success criteria prior to testing (best done at the project outset)
• Compare to baseline if you have one
• Have usability problems revealed in the heuristic evaluation been
addressed?
6. User Testing
• Define what is to be tested

• Select users based on personas
• Administer the tests
• Analyze the data
• Document the findings in a brief
• Share the findings with the development team
• Determine what design changes will be made based on test results
6. Facilitating a User Test
• Explain that you are testing the product, not the user
• Distance yourself from the product
• Don’t react
• Don’t help
• No need to write down exactly what each user does – trends will
emerge
• Save discussion or explanations for the end
How to take it home
• What is the climate of your institution when it comes to design?

• Do you have resources with the right skillsets for a UCD process?
• How much UCD can you reasonably accomplish in your current
reality?
• Can you support UCD activity with tools and/or budget?
• Who is your primary audience?

User Centered Design

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User-Centered Design

• What is User Experience?

• User Experience is the sum experience of a user interacting with a

• The aim of design is to create good user experiences.

• Design is a craft – an artistic science – that melds technology and

• Increased customer satisfaction

1. User Needs Assessment

• Try using similar services or products in order to find out:

• Let users validate or invalidate the design

• Define what is to be tested

• What is the climate of your institution when it comes to design?

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