How User Centered Design processes meets business

User Centered Design (UCD)

UCD is an people-centric design and development approach with its own tools and techniques

It (arguably and non-exclusively) draws on aspects of:

• Business and customer goal elicitation
  
• Human behavior, research, ergonomics, psychology
• Process and task analysis
  
• Market research, branding, satisfaction metrics and activities

It's aimed to create a better user experience ( I like this definition too), as the process and outcome leverages off as much information about people, their goals and needs and behaviors. It also aims to increase traceability regarding how each aspect of a website (IA, page design, graphical treatment, branding etc) or product works towards meeting the need of the client (and in turn supporting the mission of the company behind it).

UCD discovery provides insights into which cues to use when designing a task paths in website or product. that people can detect more easily to carry out that task. We eliminate any barriers towards outcomes, in the design and meets required outcomes e.g. encourage longer not shorter stays. It also allows us create inexpensive prototypes to validate information paths and interface design quickly and easily before investing more money and time in development and design.

What User Centered Design (UCD) does for projects

There is increased competition and demands to deliver 'less with more'. User Centered Design' (UCD) is an approach proven to:

• Cut development time and design iterations,
  
• Save and make money in terms of:
  
  • Mitigating risk
  • Reducing design and development time and iterations
    
  • Increasing site traffic
  • Reducing shopping cart/transaction abandonment
    
  • Increase sales and inquiry conversions

UCD has been successfully integrated into development lifecycles such as Agile and RUP. It is widely used in companies such as Hewlett Packard, ANZ Bank, Google, Apple and even Microsofts X-Box Game Halo.

UCD myths

Contrary to popular or misinformed belief, User Centered Design does not:

• Reduce you to catering for users that may not be able to deal with feature, design and interactive rich websites e.g. designing for an 80 year old on a dial up internet connection (though hopefully they will have an appropriate alternative version to use)
  
• Subordinate designers to the whimsy of business analysts or other team members
• Mean you have to get users in and out of a site with their business done as fast as possible every time
• Increase project costs - whilst there are costs to UCD activities they can be justified in cost savings as discussed above
  

How UCD is profitable, project and business focused

Running a business its about:

• Making money
  
• producing the best possible outcomes for a business and its customers which makes money
• Keeping the company running, staff paid and investors happy

Implementing User Centered Design in your business or enterprise gives you:

• A collaborative, flexible approach to web and solution design. This does not stifle the creative process or creative people
• Design, aesthetic and creative vision informed by strategic and business goals, key tasks and site audience capability throughout the design project
• A participatory and multidisciplinary approach to projects eliminating technical and design 'gotchas' later in a project. e.g. 'I can't/won't do that it will wreck the design vision/aesthetic', 'We cant do that its not possible' during the build. Everyone participants and levereages off each others knowledge and skills
  
• All team members , the overall project and design are firmly aligned with your or your clients business goals
• Requirements communicated through to design
  

We're not designing a 'Monet' for the wall to merely look at. A design should alive, touchable, pleasing, attractive and on brand . It's a website or product for your customer that also has to meet its goals, support tasks and support the company mission.

And there is no reason we can't enjoy the process along the way...

Information architecture extesibility and flexibility..

Clients would love their websites to be limitless, beyond reasonable extensibility and flexibility built into a structure. So would I...

An e-mail from a client prompted me to put this entry up.

Website information architecture or IA, the navigation structure and design work for as long as the forces (see below) operating when it was produced, stay (mainly) constant. In the long term, a website navigation model and design will naturally have to change depending on the strength, number and type of forces exerted on a business such as:

• Changes in the market the business is operating in
  
• New products and services
  
• Competitors behavior
• Brand and brand values changes
• Technology change
• Wider market forces and world events

Humans naturally limit ‘flexibility’ in topic expansion over the life of the website. They need to build a picture in their head of the main areas of the website quickly (a mental model of the site).

Putting too many topics on a branch of your navigation can cause people to get lost and frustrated if there are too many options at each level.

If in doubt try 7 plus or minus 2, a common limit based on short term memory studies. (I'll probably get shouted down for that one heh heh)

Going back a step, if the site affects a large audience you should be getting input from your target website audience into the IA in the form of a card sort (Donna Maurer provides the definitive card sort guide).

When analyzing and gathering requirements for a website. You should generate a set topics for the target website audience, to sort. The following inputs contribute to the topic set. This gives you built in flexibility of your information architecture (IA) and website templates to cope with additions:

• Your clients immediate and 3-5 year business, product and marketing strategies for future proofing
• Key topics generated from a content audit of the current website, product and service mix

The sort provides a guide for your overall IA which should also have inputs from:

• Business requirements
• Strategic plans (e.g. business, marketing, product road map etc)
• A content audit of the current website, prioritizing current content
  

These inputs also provide a design team and information architect with direction regarding the breadth and depth of information on the current web site to be considered now and over the 'lifetime' if the website. Web page designs then are built considering the sites structure and the business direction.

New topics should have a natural fit until forces exerted on a website are different from the forces it was created in. (e.g Porters five forces)

All sites structures and web page designs have reasonable limits to their flexibility before they have to change. The original requirements and card sort topics anticipate how much flexibility is required.

Information architecture (IA) is a structured topic set for a website ‘of its time’. It's based (hopefully) on requirements, business plans, user research and testing. New topics in line with a business plan should fit naturally in the structure and allow for new additions. The IA and design templates created to fit it, should be then extensible to a point.

Pete