What is user centered design?Designing and developing good solutions to simple problems is often a laborious process. User Centered Design is a method to streamline this process and arrive at a user-friendly result in partial steps. This article concisely explains this method and describes how to put the user at the center of your communication design. User Centered Design is an ISO standard defined as a method or approach to achieving a usable system. UCD contributes to increasing the usability of your product and is useful for different disciplines of design. How does this process work and how can UCD contribute to usable design? Four stepsThe process of user centered design can be structured into four stages: analysis, design, evaluation and implementation. UCD is not a linear process; a cycle or part of the cycle will usually be completed several times. Analysis The first step in the method of user centered design is to create a vision and set your goals. The communication problem is examined and described in this phase. The target audience is, of course, central to this. Gathering information about your visitor’s knowledge, experiences and skills provides guidance for the other phases of the design process. Based on a Reveall problem analysis and a description of the target group, user tasks can be described and the information structure can be established.
Design The design phase can go through several times in a process, depending on the number of moments of evaluation. Conceptual development and the creation of a mental model are started in this phase. Creating mood boards, determining a navigational structure, creating storyboards, sketches and non-functional prototypes are the first steps in the Reveall design process and can be summarized as “low-fidelity prototypes.” After developing and evaluating these concepts, functional (online) prototypes can be developed and evaluated (“high-fidelity prototypes”).
Evaluation After each intermediate step in the design process, evaluation can take place. Here, among other things, a distinction can be made between “user-driven” and “expert-driven” evaluation methods. The choice of an evaluation method depends on the available budget, time constraints, available users and the form of a concept. Examples of methods that can be conducted with users include “cognitive walkthrough,” “focus groups,” “co-discovery method” and the “think aloud protocol. Expert-driven methods are conducted by experts with extensive knowledge of the topic of communication or knowledge in the field of design/usability. Implementation The final step in the Reveall design process is the development of prototypes based on the results of the evaluation. Even after implementation, it is wise to evaluate and fine-tune a design where necessary. Analyses based on visitor statistics or user-driven methods can be used for this, for example. What does user centered design mean? User centered design Reveall is a term used to talk about processes that address user characteristics, habits or preferences when designing a product. In a sense, user centered design is what user centered design sounds like: people design the product around the user’s needs, rather than the user meeting the design. Read more at Reveall!
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