User-centered Design at ETS

In the ETS User Experience Group, we follow a methodology called user-centered design (UCD). User-centered design is a product development methodology that helps us create products that are focused on the needs, behaviors, goals, abilities, and perceptions of our users. UCD can be applied to all different kinds of products, from websites & web applications to physical products to physical spaces. Here at ETS we spend most of our time following UCD practices as we create web applications for students, faculty & staff on campus.

User-centered design was a reaction to more designer-centric, business-centric or programmer-centric design, where understanding the needs of the users wasn’t really a significant part of the design process. A business which presents the information it wants to share (e.g. a product catalog or list of services) on its website in the way that makes most sense to them, without considering what information users of the site would want to see or how they would want to consume it, is not user-centered. A programmer who creates a web application based on how they think it would be used rather than thinking about it from the perspective of (usually much-less technical) actual end users, is not being user-centered.

There are many benefits to designing products in a user-centered way. Some of these include:

• Increased customer satisfaction
• Reduced development time and costs: focus on creating only the features users need, and doing it right the first time
• Increased service/site usage and adoption
• Increased user productivity/efficiency/accuracy
• Decreased support and training costs
• Reduced maintenance costs[1]

User-centered design techniques help us: 1) ensure that user needs are incorporated into the requirements definition process, and 2) ensure that the applications we develop are usable and meet our end users needs. UCD begins long before we begin to create screens for an application; it starts at the very beginning of the project where we determine what we are designing.

At ETS we loosely follow an adapted version of Cooper[2] Interaction Design’s user-centered design methodology. It may be more accurate to call UCD a philosophy than a methodology, as it can involve different activities for every project—there isn’t a strict checklist of steps that must always be followed. We choose certain UCD activities for each project based on the characteristics, goals and constraints of that project. The phases of the user-centered design process and some of the potential activities in each phase include:

• User Research – interviews, observation, surveys
• Modeling – personas, artifact models, mental models, activity diagrams
• Requirements Definition – context scenarios, use cases, requirements lists, comparative analysis
• UI Framework Definition – key path scenarios, high-level interaction framework
• UI Design – wireframes, mock-ups, style guide, prototyping
• Evaluation – heuristic evaluation, prototyping, usability testing
• Development Support – open communication with developers

In future articles, we will discuss each of these phases, and the UCD tools within them, in more detail.

[1] Adapted from http://www.upassoc.org/usability_resources/about_usability/definitions_o...

[2] http://www.cooper.com/