User-Centered Design: The Secret of Creating an Engaging Customer Experience

“User-centered design (UCD) is a broad term to describe design processes in which end-users influence how a design takes shape. It is both a broad philosophy and variety of methods” — Abras, C., Maloney-Krichmar, D., & Preece, J. (2004)

According to Garrett, J. J. (2010), User-Centered Design is a philosophy of product development. This philosophy said that the product is not an end in itself. The product is a means toward the end of providing a good experience for the user. User-Centered Design is a suite of methods, emphasizing understanding people rather than technology.

User-Centered Design is an iterative design process in which designers focus on the users and their needs in each phase of the design process. According to the Usability Professionals Association (UPA)(2017), User-Centered Design help to approach the process in information about the people who use the product.

User-Centered Design Origin

The term ‘User-Centered Design’ was originated by Norman and Draper (1986) in their research laboratory at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). This term became widely used after the publication of their book: User-Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction (Norman & Draper, 1986). Norman built further on the UCD concept in his seminal book The Psychology Of Everyday Things (POET) (Norman, 1988). In this book, he offers 4 basic suggestion on how a design should be:

1. Make it easy to determine what actions are possible at any moment.
2. Make things visible, including the conceptual model of the system, the alternative actions, and the results of actions.
3. Make it easy to evaluate the current state of the system.
4. Follow natural mappings between intentions and the required actions; between actions and the resulting effect; and between the information that is visible and the interpretation of the system state.

These recommendations place the user as the center of the design. The role of the designer is to facilitate the task for the user and to make sure that the user is able to make use of the product as intended and with a minimum effort to learn how to use it.

After the publication from Norman and Draper became so popular, there appeared many other similar sets of principles of User-Centered Design, for example, Shneiderman (1987) propose eight golden rules about User interface design for the Hyperties electronic encyclopedia, Jakob Nielsen (1993) adapted popularized these same basic concepts to produce heuristics for usability engineering, and also Preece, Rogers, & Sharp (2002) that do research about how user-centered design lead to more effective, efficient and safer products and contributed to the acceptance and success of products.

User Experience

Use Experience (UX) is the impressions that are created when users use the application (Software Development Project Handbook (2019)). User Experience is about how a product behaves and is used in the real world. It is beyond the product to its context in people’s lives, therefore User Experience must incorporate a diverse range of factors.

User-centered design improves user experience. While it can be applied to almost any product. User Experience should be implemented throughout the entire customer experience, without guessing or personal opinion. Every bit that the customer has with the product should be analyzed, well design and developed.

The Elements of User Experience

source: Garrett, J. J. (2010). Elements of user experience

1. Visual Design: graphic treatment of interface elements (the “look” in “look-and-feel”)
2. Interface Design: as in traditional Human-Computer Interaction, the design of interface elements to facilitate user interaction with functionality
   Information Design: in the Tuftean sense, designing the presentation of information to facilitate understanding of the users
3. Interaction Design: development of application flows to facilitate user tasks, defining how the user interacts with site functionality
4. Functional Specifications: “feature set”: detailed descriptions of functionality the site must include in order to meet user needs
5. User Needs: externally derived goals for the site; identified through user research, ethnic/techno/psychographics, etc.
   Site Objectives: business, creative, or other internally derived goals for the site

The Experience Success Ladder

source: https://drawbackwards.com/blog/ux-design-success-ladder-for-meaningful-product-design/

According to Ward Andrews (2016), there are 5 step ladders to create meaningful experiences:

1. Level 1: Functional→ At this level, the designers just “get their jobs done”. Instead of being designed based on user needs, functional experiences are engineering- or development-driven, and often heavily influenced by internal preferences and politics.
2. Level 2: Usable → At this level, the designers understand that the task completion by the user must be effective, efficient, and have a certain uniform pattern.
3. Level 3: Comfortable → The experience provided can make the users comfortable. It should have an intuitive interface, therefore, the users should feel happy and want to use the product again.
4. Level 4: Delightful → Delightful experiences go beyond helping users accomplish tasks intuitively. They actually make it fun and desirable.
5. Level 5: Meaningful → Meaningful experiences are more than just functional, usable, comfortable, and delightful. They change the user’s life and create long-lasting success for the team who designed them.

User Interface

User Interface (UI) is everything designed into an information device with which a person may interact (Rouse, Margaret (2016)). This can include display screens, keyboards, a mouse and the appearance of a desktop. It is also the way through which a user interacts with an application or a website. The growing dependence of many companies on web applications and mobile applications has led many companies to place increased priority on UI in an effort to improve the user’s overall experience (UX).

How to Make a Great User-Centered Design Products?

The answer is quite simple. It is simply just to involve users in design.

It is necessary to think carefully about who is a user and how to involve users in the design process. Obviously, users are the people who will use the final product or artifact to accomplish a task or goal. But there are other users as well. The people who manage the users have needs and expectations too. What about those persons who are affected in some way by the use of the artifact or use the products and/or services of the artifact? Shouldn’t their needs and expectations be taken into consideration in the design process? Eason (1987) identified three types of users: primary, secondary, and tertiary.

1. Primary users: those persons who actually use the artifact
2. Secondary users: those who will occasionally use the artifact or those who use it through an intermediary
3. Tertiary users: persons who will be affected by the use of the artifact or make decisions about its purchase

The successful design of a product must take into account the wide range of stakeholders of the artifact. Not everyone who is a stakeholder needs to be represented on a design team, but the effect of the artifact on them must be considered (Preece, et. al, 2002).

Usability Testing

According to Dumas & Redish (1993), Usability testing aims to achieve:

1. Improvement of the product’s usability
2. Involvement of real users in the testing
3. An accomplishment of the real task given to the users
4. Permission for testers to observe and record the actions of the participants
5. Permission for testers to analyze the data obtained and make changes accordingly

Persona

Personas are abstractions of groups of real consumers who share common characteristics and needs (Pruitt & Adlin, 2006). A persona is represented through a fictional individual, who in turn represents a group of real consumers with similar characteristics (Turner & Turner, 2010). Even though a persona is not a real person, a name and a picture are selected to represent the fictional representative.

According to the Software Engineering Project 2019 Handbook, persona consists of some fundamental elements, such as:

1. Name and profile picture
2. Demographic: personal information such as age, gender, education, ethnicity, etc.
3. Job detail
4. Residency
5. Personal background: information of his/her life day-by-day
6. Goals: The goal that wanted to be achieved when using the product
7. Motivations: Why he/she wants to achieve that goal
8. Behavior: online and offline behavior
9. Pain points/ frustrations: His/her problem in daily life that is related to the product.
10. Quotes: His / her principle related to his/her needs.

The purpose of the Persona is to:

1. Provide a vivid story concerning the needs of the persona in the context of the product being designed.
2. Ease the designers to focus on a summary description of a group of people.

When you create a persona, it needs to describe the actual situation, not based on the designer’s assumption. You should make an analysis of the user’s categorization. According to Lene Nielsen (2010) in her Interaction Design Foundation encyclopedia article, Personas., these are 10-step process on how to create personas, as summarized from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/personas-why-and-how-you-should-use-them:

1. Collect data. Collect as much knowledge about the users as possible. Perform high-quality user research of actual users in your target user group. In Design Thinking, the research phase is the first phase, also known as the Empathise phase.
2. Form a hypothesis. Based upon your initial research, you will form a general idea of the various users within the focus area of the project, including the ways users differ from one another
3. Everyone accepts the hypothesis. The goal is to support or reject the first hypothesis about the differences between the users
4. Establish a number. You will decide upon the final number of personas, which it makes sense to create
5. Describe the personas. The purpose of working with personas is to be able to develop solutions, products, and services based upon the needs and goals of your users. Be sure to describe personas in such ways so as to express enough understanding and empathy to understand the users.
6. Prepare situations or scenarios for your personas. This engaging persona method is directed at creating scenarios that describe solutions. For this purpose, you should describe a number of specific situations that could trigger the use of the product or service you are designing
7. Obtain acceptance from the organization. It is a common thread throughout all 10 steps that the goal of the method is to involve the project participants.
8. Disseminate knowledge. In order for the participants to use the method, the persona descriptions should be disseminated to all. It is important to decide early on how you want to disseminate this knowledge to those who have not participated directly in the process.
9. Everyone prepares scenarios. Personas have no value in themselves until the persona becomes part of a scenario — the story about how the persona uses a future product — it does not have real value.
10. Make ongoing adjustments. The last step is the future life of the persona descriptions. You should revise the descriptions on a regular basis. New information and new aspects may affect the descriptions. Sometimes you would need to rewrite the existing persona descriptions, add new personas, or eliminate outdated personas.

The Implementation of Persona in Software Engineering Project Class

On our Software Engineering Project, we are given 2 roles to create. Each role has different goals and functionality. In order to create a better User Experience, us, the designer, have to understand the roles of each persona.

For example, the first role is a student. The student will want to have some sort of User Experience that will engage them to learn more about a topic. He/she wants the system able to provide their needs to study well. He/she also would like to have a lot of friends, so he/she expects the system will be able to provide a great learning experience with friends.

The second role, for example, is a teacher. The teacher would want to have a facility to connect better with their student, therefore, creating a better environment for teaching-learning activities. The teacher also wants the student to be proactive, therefore, he/she expects the system will make the environment better for students to ask the teacher, whether using a post or just private message.

References:

1. Abras, C., Maloney-Krichmar, D., & Preece, J. (2004). User-centered design. Bainbridge, W. Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 37(4), 445–456.
2. Garrett, J. J. (2010). Elements of user experience, the: user-centered design for the web and beyond. Pearson Education.
3. De Troyer, O. M. F., & Leune, C. J. (1998). WSDM: a user-centered design method for Web sites. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30(1–7), 85–94.
4. Norman, D. A., & Draper, S. W. (1986). User-centered system design: New perspectives on human-computer interaction. CRC Press.
5. Miaskiewicz, T., & Kozar, K. A. (2011). Personas and user-centered design: How can personas benefit product design processes?. Design studies, 32(5), 417–430.
6. Shneiderman, B. (1987, November). User interface design for the Hyperties electronic encyclopedia. In Hypertext(Vol. 87, pp. 189–194).
7. Software Development Project Handbook 2019