Human-Centred Standards for Interactive Systems

Human-centred design is a process that places the user at the centre of the solution, using empathy and understanding to guide decision-making; allowing us to deliver the best solution that meets the users’ needs.

‘Do you think this navigation bar would help?’

User experience professionals occasionally receive criticism when using this seemingly harmless phrase to respond to requests. Of course, follow-up questions, such as: what’s the product; what problem are we trying to solve; who are we designing for; what are the goals; among others, give context to the answer.

The thing is, what works well in one situation may be terrible in another. UX is contextual, which ultimately means the best solution really depends on the context of use!

Lots of things can influence a user’s needs: motivation, experience, age, goals and the factors surrounding its use. On the face of it, the best solution to such a problem would be to focus on what’s best for the users, yet it depends entirely on the users’ specific needs. Apologies for sounding like a broken record, however, this is precisely the element that causes the most frustration — there is no simple, ‘straightforward’ answer. User Experience Design is a tailored method. Therefore, those seeking to discover an ‘out-of-the-box’ solution will be disappointed.

User Experience Design is a process and not a deliverable

It’s important to have a design process in place that helps put assumptions aside and to do research to understand the problem. More often than not, people claim to be implementing a UX approach with incredibly positive results, however, what they’re doing is essentially dressing up business requirements.

The key to unlocking the full potential of the UX design process is to discover users’ actual needs and to identify the context of use and design for that purpose. This allows us to take effective design decisions and helps companies to achieve their business goals more efficiently.

UXD Decision Styles

The style of UXD decisions comes in all shapes and sizes, which has a knock-on effect on how we decide and define the solutions we develop later on.

Unintended Design occurs when the team is designing without any consideration of what will happen when real users try to use the interface they’ve built. This is typically where design decisions are carried out according to a ‘what’s easiest to implement’ approach.

Genius Design looks to the team members’ previous experiences to shape their decisions moving forward. Unfortunately, there is no quick fix. Just because the team has designed the same functionality before, doesn’t mean they can design and build the feature in a different context, for a different customer, with no clear understanding of who the users are and what they’re aiming for in that specific context.

Activity-Focused Design executes research looking for stakeholders and other people that aren’t the real end users. These activities provide insights that can improve design decisions, yet there’s still a complete absence of user interaction, which in other words means we’re not designing for them, but for other stakeholders instead. To put it simply, don’t expect much from this approach.

Human-Centred Design focuses on conducting research on top of who the users are, looking in-depth at their goals, needs, and contexts of use. Prototypes, testing ideas, and iterating a solution based on real end users’ feedback are key for a solution that meets user requirements. This approach provides us with valuable information and insights that our customers couldn’t otherwise reach.

ISO 9241: Ergonomics of Human-System Interaction

ISO 9241 is a multi-part standard from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) covering the ergonomics of human-computer interaction. Part 210, Human-centred design for interactive systems, created in 2010 (formerly ISO 13407, withdrawn, 1999), and updated in 2019, guides human-system interaction throughout the lifecycle of interactive systems.

This normative provides guidance and reflects the human-centred design principles and activities throughout the lifecycle of computer-based products. It deals with ways in which both hardware and software components can enhance human-system interaction. In short, it provides a plan on how to design and develop a product that will be profitable and not waste hours of work.

Process

The first step of the plan is to actually have a plan! Depending on the stage of the product, we organise activities that will take place in order to adapt to the needs and constraints of the project.

Secondly, it’s vital to seek the voice of the users. Speaking to them, understanding their needs and context of use combined with activities such as interviews, surveys, and field studies, are the most used tools in the understanding phase.

Once we’ve established the context of use, the next step is to specify the requirements by focusing our attention on the project and user needs.

The fourth step is to transform those requirements into wireframes and mock-ups, screens and prototypes, which will later be tested with real users.

The last step centres around trial and error. Testing is a crucial step to iron out all the issues until we have a solution that meets the users’ requirements.

Principles

The design needs to be based on an explicit understanding of users, tasks and contexts. Going in with guns blazing and assuming who the users are and taking a wild guess regarding their tasks, context, and needs sounds as nonsensical as is it in practice. Instead, we ask the users.

Users are involved throughout the design and development process. We involve users not only when the prototype is complete and we want to test it but from the very beginning of the process. This boils down to a very simple reason: blindly designing and building a prototype around what we think users need is a sure-fire way to give you problems further down the road. Not only does this incur additional expense and resources, but it also disrupts the creative process and introduces a potential and unnecessary strain to the customer journey. Identifying the users’ needs at the very beginning gives us the clarity to move on in an effective way, which will result in minor changes when testing the prototype later in the process as opposed to making major changes to the overall solution, or in the worst case, going back to the drawing board.

The design is driven and refined by user-centred evaluation. We should use real users, not our colleagues or ex-users. It just doesn’t give us the same result. People involved in the project already have insights about the product, therefore, the results of the testing will be compromised.

The process is iterative because we repeat the tests with users as much as we need to. The finish line is not the same in all projects.

The design addresses the whole user experience. We must look at the whole user experience and environment and not only the product. For instance, developing a phone app should be tested in all the environments in which it’s used, and not simply sitting in a chair at home. If the app is to be used outside, with noise, or in motion, then the attention and experience will be completely different.

The design team includes multidisciplinary skills and perspectives. This is a simple question of teamwork. The designers may not know certain things, like the solution’s technical feasibility, whereas the developers could bring some highly creative ideas to the table.

Benefits

Systems designed using human-centred methods have improved quality, for example, by:

• Increasing user productivity and organisations’ operational efficiency as this approach ensures that the right system is built, by fulfilling real needs and purposes.
• Being easier to understand and use, thus reducing training. As the systems are tested with users, they will work in the real world and present information in a simple, findable and easy-to-navigate way.
• Increasing usability for people with a wider range of capabilities (inclusion).
• Reducing discomfort and stress, which will allow users to trust the system to do the job that it is supposed to do while protecting brand experiences and reputations.
• Ensuring businesses meet legal and industry requirements.
• Providing a competitive advantage as users prefer products that fit a purpose, that are easy to use, that are inclusive and that they can trust.
• Contributing towards sustainability objectives. Attractive and easy-to-use interfaces are desirable, and this correlates positively with customer loyalty.

Conclusion

In a business environment, we are expected to create a system that aligns with specified business goals. However, this is unfortunately NOT the system users would necessarily need to have to achieve their goals in a faster and easy way. There is often a trade-off between the goals of employers (customers) and employees (users).

Empowering UXD to do the right thing is a beginning; thinking together is progress; working together is a success

Empower the UX design process in projects by working and thinking together as a team. User experience design is not lumbered onto one person. It is a team effort. Every time you make a decision (engineering or technological), you are designing the user experience too.

Get in touch

Pedro Duarte, Head of User Experience Design at Critical Software
Designing for critical systems

uxd@criticalsoftware.com