Dan McCracken: User-Centered Design

For a quick introduction to the concept, here is an except from a Web site describing IBM's User-Centered Design Labs. I believe that IBM started using the term User-Centered Design around 1992. Follow that link and you will find many links to other IBM material on the subject of ease of use.

What is User-Centered Design?

How do designers come up with an interface that's not in your face? That just does what you want, and doesn't make you waste time doing what it wants? Easy-to-use software doesn't just happen. It requires focusing on the product's potential users from the very beginning, and checking at each step of the way with these users to be sure they will like and be comfortable with the final design. The User-Centered Design (UCD) process starts by forming a multi-disciplinary UCD project team. This team will work with the product's users throughout the design process and beyond. So the first thing that the UCD team must figure out is: Who will be using the product?

Once this target audience has been identified, representative users can be recruited to work with the team. These users help establish the requirements for the product by answering questions such as:

What do you want the product to do for you?
In what sort of environment will you be using the product?
What are your priorities when using the software? For example, which functions will you use most often?

The answers to these questions start the process of user task analysis.

For another view, here are the opening paragraphs from the current draft of the second chapter of User-Centered Web Site Design, by Daniel D. McCracken and Rosalee Wolfe, to be published by Prentice Hall in 2003. (This work is supported in part by National Science Foundation grant DUE 0088184.)

The goal of user-centered Web site design is implicit in the name: to produce Web sites that are easy to use. This may seem obvious, but making a product easy to use is more than providing functionality. In a usage study of one banking product that had 82 commands, over a third of them were never used! For example, it will not matter whether a Web site uses the latest server technology if it is poorly organized. If a Web site is so confusing that many users give up without achieving the purpose for which they visited the site, nothing else matters. We have failed.

In a book that has “User-Centered” right in the title, we accordingly begin our study with the user. This chapter focuses on:

· Some key capabilities of human beings, in this context: perception and memory.

· User analysis: What do we need to know about our users?

· Task analysis: How do we know what our users’ goals are and how do we learn what tasks they carry out to achieve those goals?

· Environment analysis: When a user carries out a task, what are his or her surroundings? How do these affect the user?

· Having identified the users goals and tasks, how do we define usability, set usability goals, and measure usability?