Week 6: User Centered Design

User-Centered Design (UCD) or pervasive usability is a design philosophy and a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of end users of a product are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process. User-centered design can be characterized as a multi-stage problem solving process that not only requires designers to analyze and foresee how users are likely to use a product, but also to test the validity of their assumptions with regards to user behaviour in real world tests with actual users. Such testing is necessary as it is often very difficult for the designers of a product to understand intuitively what a first-time user of their design experiences, and what each user's learning curve may look like.

Advantages and Disadvantages of user-centered design:

Advantages
- Products are more efficient,effective, and safe.
- Assists in managing users expectations and levels of satisfaction with the product.
- Users develop a sense of ownership for the product.
- Products require less redesign and integrate into the environment more quickly.
- The collaborative process generated more creative design solutions to problems.

Disadvantages
- It is more costly.
- It takes more time.
- May require the involvement of additional design team members (i. e. ethnographers,usability experts) and wide range of stakeholders
- May be difficult to translate some types of data into design
- The product may be too specific for more general use, thus not readily transferable to other clients; thus more costly

As my conclusion, User-centered design (UCD) is a general term for a philosophy and methods which focus on designing for and involving users in the design of computerized systems. The ways in which users participate can vary. At one end of the spectrum involvement may be relatively light; they may be consulted about their needs, observed and participate in usability testing. At the other end of the spectrum involvement can be intensive with users participating throughout the design process as partners in the design. A variety of methods have been developed to support UCD including usability testing, usability engineering, heuristic evaluation, discount evaluation and participatory design. Quick and dirty evaluations is also important in which ideas are taken to a few representative users for their feedback early in design. Involving users in design one way or
another has been shown to lead to developing more usable satisfying designs.

By WONG SOON HAN