User Centered Design (UCD)

• Budget, technical constraints, business goals and internal politics are always present in a product development cycle. Surprisingly often, however, the people who will actually use the end product are left out: The Users.
• User Centered Design is more all encompassing than Usability. It is a methodology that centers the user in the midst of the process. Who is the user, what do they want from the product or service? How do they want to get it? What are their motivations? What are their primary goals and tasks? Using techniques such as Focus Groups, Questionnaires, Field Observation, Usability Evaluations and Task Analysis, the answers to these questions are fed into the User Requirement Specification.

• This then feeds into the functional specification, which includes other issues, such as the project constraints: budget, time, technical, business and political. UCD is an iterative process that goes through iterations of designing testing with users and correcting any resulting issues that may arise.
• You can create personas for your users and use ‘walk-through’ techniques to understand the flow and how users would navigate through the tasks. You can bring users in frequently to test your ideas and assumptions. The UCD approach is cost-effective in that prototypes can be developed on paper and tested before much effort or money has been spent developing a product that doesn't work for the users.

Interface IQ can provide the following User Centered Design services:

• Generate, catalogue and analyse user requirements, using Focus Groups, Interviews, Questionnaires, Field Observation, Usability Evaluations, Personas, Scenario building and Task Analysis
• Create wire-frame prototypes to test concepts

• Conduct card-sorting exercises to understand how your target customers understand the classification and labeling of your service or product
• Plan and deliver Usability Evaluations throughout the various development stages, from Low-Fi paper prototyping to Hi-Fi prototypes.