What is User-Centered Design (UCD) and why does it matter?

User-centered design (UCD) is a set of processes that emphasize users and user experience as the focus of design and development. Product teams incorporate users’ requirements, objectives, and input into their product design. All design decisions are evaluated in the context of how the users’ needs are being met. By focusing on delivering value to the users and their experiences, the user-centered design gives an organization a way to add emotional impact to its deliverables. 

User-centered design incorporates fundamental principles applied to the design process: 

• Involve users from the start–All important design decisions should be evaluated against the value added to the end user experience. 
• Clarify requirements–Product teams must always align requirements with users’ needs.
• Use feedback loops–Collect and analyze feedback from users frequently and regularly. 
• Iterate and improve the design process–Product teams must continually improve the user experience, introducing changes progressively as they improve their understanding of users’ needs. 

Product teams often make use of the five-stage design process developed by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford: 

1. Empathize 
2. Define 
3. Ideate 
4. Prototype 
5. Test 

Personas 

A persona is an archetype of your users. It is a depiction of a group of people who have the same needs, skills, behaviors, and ideas. By using user personas, you can better understand their issues and goals, which helps you make better decisions about product features and solutions. 

Context 

Once you have a better understanding of who your product is being designed for, you now must understand how your users will use your product. An organization must consider why users would want to use their product and how users would want to use it. You must design your product to provide a solution to whatever issues or problems your users have. 

Journey mapping/storyboarding 

An effective solution to users’ issues and problems is to examine their interactions with your product. You would typically design your product to fit into an existing ecosystem. With that understanding, you can visualize the journey the user makes through that ecosystem. Employing a technique, such as a journey map, or creating a storyboard to describe the user journey gives you a way to view your product from the users’ point of view. 

Observation 

Observation is a valuable tool for gathering qualitative insight about your users’ experience. By observing how your users interact with your product, you can gain valuable information about what is working and what requires a redesign to improve their interaction. There are two methods for validating design decisions: 

• usability testing 
• contextual inquiries, which involve observation and interview of users as they perform tasks.