Don't put the cart before the horse when it comes to your design process. The sooner you show your prototype to actual users and get feedback, the easier it will be to look at the design from the user's point of view.

Two young fish meet an older fish, who asks them, "How's the water?" The younger fish look at each other and say, "What's water?" They're so surrounded by it that it's impossible to see.

The most important realities are often the hardest to see and talk about. We should also not forget about the water we swim in within the design process. The users are the most obvious reality for designers.

This movement started in the 1980s when designers and computer scientists began to work together towards focusing the design of computer software around users and not around computers.

Let's go behind the scenes of the design process and discover what user-centered or oriented design really means.

  • What Is User-Centered Design And How To Create It In A User-Centric Way? 👨‍💻
  • User-Centered Design: Definitions And Main Characteristics 🔍
  • User-Centered Design Process 💻
  • Benefits Of User-Centric Design 🥇
  • User-Centered Design Examples 🎴
  • User-Centric Design Creates The Customer Development Basis 🧩
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    What Is User-Centered Design And How To Create It In A User-Centric Way? 👨‍💻

    User-centered design (UCD) is human-centered design; it offers solutions to numerous problems and creates a unique chance to design together with communities.

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    User-centered designers deeply understand the people they are looking to serve, dream up scores of ideas, and create innovative new solutions rooted in people's actual needs and provide a positive user experience. 

    Six phases and their key principles of the UCD process diagram are described in this guide:

    1. Specify the user context — collect information about their users' needs.
    2. Specify clear business requirements — the designers and the stakeholders provide detailed specifications for the new product or project vision.
    3. Create unique design solutions — building a solution, from rough concept to finished design.
    4. Evaluate designs — through usability testing with real users.
    5. Implementation — the process of developing and delivering the product alongside development teams.
    6. Deployment — the final product is frequently evaluated as consumer needs evolve and change.

    User-Centered Design: Definitions And Main Characteristics 🔍

    Definition Of User-Centric Design

    User-centered design is a creative approach to problem-solving: it starts with people and ends with individual solutions that are tailored to their needs.

    When you understand the people you are trying to reach and then design from their perspective, not only will you come up with unexpected answers, but you will also come up with ideas and design decisions they will embrace.

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    User-Oriented Design is both how you think and what you do.

    Over the last few years, many companies have included user-centered design (UCD) in their organizational strategy. IKEA, Lego, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple shifted their focus on the emotional relationship between their products and the consumer instead of focusing on technology.

    Apple applies user-centered design methods to study new products and whether they meet consumer needs.

    Motivated interdisciplinary teams don't create solutions for people; they create responsive designs together with the people they want to impact.

    User-centered design makes use of empathy, optimism, and an open mind. These are some of the key characteristics of user-centered design:

    User-Centered Design Is Empathetic

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    We pay attention to people and put ourselves in their shoes. The community and its components of empathy are integral to creating the result and cherishing it. 

    If you take the time to listen and understand people, you can prevent disasters like the $1.3 billion that the Los Angeles Unified School District spent on 700,000 iPads for every student.

    The administration didn't buy in, teachers were not trained, the technical support was not sufficient — and students, of course, abused them.

    After spending at least 20 minutes in each of these schools, the officials behind this project realized that iPads were not at the top of the students' list of needs because fewer than half of the students displayed a sufficient level of academic performance.

    User-Centered Design Is Iterative

    When we test, fail, and try again. This process develops an understanding of the target user's needs through a combination of research, interviews, generative methods, and tools like brainstorming.

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    UCD largely includes users at all user-centered design steps. It's depended on feedback from everyone involved.

    User-Centered Design Is Interdisciplinary

    It provides a common language that enables specialists in several disciplines (ethnographers, psychologists, software and hardware engineers), stakeholders, and end users to work together.

    Jay Trimble, who works for the Lunar Rover Mission at NASA, explains how the agency integrated user-centered design techniques into its Agile workflows. NASA also employs ethnography methods of UCD and user interviews, user observations and feedback in context, a lot of wireframing, lots of prototyping, and journey maps.

    As a result, user-centered design not only works in schools to impact education — it helps design products, spaces, systems, and services — to drive social innovation and impact in areas such as health, economy, and the environment.

    Exploratory Research And Goals Of User-Centric Design

    User research is all about talking with people about their challenges, goals, and constraints. But there will be moments in the product design process where you'll need more context, history, or business metrics than a man-on-the-street style interview can provide.

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    Talk directly with the people you're designing for through personal, group, or expert interviews. 

    There are a few better ways to understand their hopes, desires, and aspirations.

    User-centered design principles adhere to the following responsive factors:

    • A clear understanding of the users, tasks, and environments
    • Evaluation-driven design
    • Considers the overall consumer experience
    • Involves the consumer in the design and production process

    User-Centered Design Process 💻

  • Specify The User Context
  • Specify Requirements
  • Create Design Solutions
  • Evaluate Design
  • Implement
  • Deployment
  • Specify The User Context

    Identify the people who will use the product, the target audiences, what they will use it for, and the conditions under which they will use it. Observe people's lives, hear their hopes and desires, and get smart about your challenge.

    Get inspired by the international INDEX:Award: "Design to Improve Life" in Copenhagen, Denmark, which is the world's most subsidized design award in the humanitarian field.

    One award-winning prototype is the effective plastic water filter, LIFESTRAW (Denmark), which costs $3 to produce.

    The designers of this project don't propose a general solution for the quality of drinking water and also don't oppose the privatization of water. They just proposed a solution for a specific time and space.

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    The user-centered design approach focuses on users' needs and goals, and designers should try to fit their products to the target market they intend to serve. 

    If you think this is a very difficult task, start to practice user-centered design with the focus on developing a user-centric product, and you will quickly change your mind.

    Specify Requirements

    User-centered design arrives at solutions that are desirable, feasible, and viable. By starting with user goals, hopes, fears, and needs, designers quickly discover what's most desirable. But that's only one lens through which they look at their solutions.

    After determining a range of solutions for the people, designers start to research what is technically feasible and how to make the solutions financially viable. It is crucial that design solutions increase customer loyalty, maintain customer satisfaction, and attract investment.

    As you solidify your idea and start to test it, you'll need to remain mindful of your business requirements. Above all, refine your design idea and move toward implementing it by asking these simple questions:

    • What's your revenue stream?
    • What key partnerships will you need to forge?
    • What resources are vital to your operation?

    Create Design Solutions

    This part of the UCD process may be done in stages, building from a rough concept to a complete design.

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    Here you'll make sense of everything you've learned, generate many ideas, identify design opportunities, and test and refine your solutions. 

    Turbo Tax's web app is an example of an intuitive design solution that uses human language in its design.

    Image Source: TurboTax

    You have to learn on the fly and open yourself up to creative opportunities and trust, as long as you remain grounded in the desires of the people you design for.

    You will come up with many ideas, some too insane to work, some too crazy not to try, and you will toss out the bad and improve the good.

    Creating projects helps you analyze, develop, and test your ideas. When you use your idea to build a simple, tangible prototype, it gives you something to put right back into the hands of the people you are designing for.

    Without their input, you may no longer know if your solution is on the right track. Keep iterating, testing, and integrating the feedback until you get everything right.

    Evaluate Design

    Don't put the cart before the horse – do usability testing with the actual users. The sooner you show your design to the actual users and get feedback from them, the easier it will be to look at the design from the user's point of view.

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    Evaluation is as integral in the user-centered design process as quality testing in software development.

    We still do not have the perfect user-centered mobile communication technology yet, but we are moving in the right direction. IOS and Android seem to improve and learn from each other constantly.

    The visual experience becomes more realistic yet easy on the eye. For example, the translucent screens in iOS give a hint of the content behind it instead of blocking out what you were doing before.

    This is similar to focusing your eye on something. The reality behind you doesn't disappear but becomes fuzzy while you are reading on your mobile or computer.

    Implement

    In the implementation phase, you'll bring your solution to life and to the market. You'll build partnerships, form collaborative approaches, refine your business model, pilot your idea, and get a reliable solution.

    What no one tells you is that the best way to build empathy with the people you're designing for is to immerse yourself in their worlds. IDEO is well-known for its user-centered design practice.

    For example, IDEO's design team worked on a mobile app for the Chicago nonprofit organization, Moneythink. The app's goal was to reinforce good financial habits among low-income teens.

    The design team conducted its research in the following way:

    • By attending the workshops that Moneythink offers in schools and talking with students.
    • Conducting interviews about their personal finances, what kind of tools they use, and how money flows in and out of their lives.
    • Touring the neighborhoods and seeing where students live to discover their living conditions.
    • Visiting check-cashing stores and prepaid mobile phone stores to understand the financial services the community uses.
    • Immersing itself in the social apps students use most: Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat.
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    By immersing themselves in the students' physical and digital, the team utilized a comprehensive approach and arrived at some key insights. 

    Ultimately, they noticed that, for these teens, money was highly social. For example, it came in on birthdays and flowed out while in the company of friends.

    It helped them to prototype the Moneythink app design. The team found that by adding a social component to the Moneythink app, they could help drive better financial habits.

    Deployment

    When you're on the verge of getting your product out into the world, you'll need to discover if you'll have the impact you want. There are many ways to run an assessment — sometimes it's either your solution makes money or it doesn't.

    But if you're trying to change a community's behavior or increase service adoption, you may need a more nuanced approach.

    Besides tracking qualitative indicators and collecting insider information, confessions, and anecdotal feedback, you'll be able to recognize the genuine outcomes of your work and synthesize everything you've learned.

    Compare these outcomes to your team's goals and business values to assess whether you're ready for product deployment.

    Benefits Of User-Centric Design 🥇

    Avoiding Common Mistakes

    According to Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D. (Americas Human Factors International), three of the top 12 reasons that IT projects fail are directly associated with what we would call user experience or user-centered design work. Those three are:

    • Badly defined requirements
    • Poor communication among customers, developers, and users
    • Conflicting stakeholder politics

    Other reasons include unrealistic project goals, incorrect evaluation of required resources, poor representation of project status, unmanaged risks, the use of immature technologies, inability to cope with project complexity, negligent development methods, unsuccessful project management, and money pressures.

    Through stakeholder interviews, user research, and user testing, user-centered design can fix at least three of those 12 reasons for software failure. You can calculate the financial savings or additional revenue or benefit that you get by improving your UX in the product.

    What It Brings To The Team And The Development Process

    UCD influences the final success of the product release. Microsoft is one of the strong examples of adapting the dynamic user-centered design. For a long time, it was a technology-driven organization.

    Now, the company has shifted its strategy to be user-centered — through authentic UCD process properties which are focused on users.

    Their applications had become increasingly complex, which was negative for the UX. Therefore, Microsoft decided that user-centered design should be used to bring the user back into the heart of their software development process.

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    Focusing on the team and building a creative development process has positively impacted this software giant's productivity, creativity, and business success.

    Statistics That Show The Success Of The Approach

    Let's talk about the return on investment (ROI) of doing user experience research.

    Here's some interesting data from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a professional organization that puts out reports and does research for programmers, developers, and engineers.

    They estimate the amount of money spent worldwide on IT to be $1 trillion a year – and that up to 15% of all projects are abandoned because they are hopelessly inadequate.

    The percentage of revenue directed to the IT group is 5% of a company's total revenue and up to 10% if it's a financial or telecommunications enterprise.

    Programmers spend 50% of their time on rework that is actually avoidable. The cost of fixing an error after development is 100 times that of fixing an error before project development is finished.

    By following the lessons in this UCD guide, you can identify problems before they emerge and look for solutions at an early stage to save time and money for unburdened product development.

    User-Centered Design Examples 🎴

    Trello

    Trello is a good example of engaging UX design – it doesn't have many unnecessary features.

    Everything on the home screen is easy to understand and works exactly the way it should, without allowing any confusion over how to move tasks from one board to another.

    Image Source: Trello
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    The interface design is intuitive, and those using the app for the first time have no trouble navigating the different pages.

    Duolingo

    Anyone who has used Duolingo understands the simplicity of the app. You can move on to the more advanced categories by completing one task or game.

    Image Source: Duolingo

    Incorporating the addictiveness of a mobile gaming app and using it to teach the world new languages is simply a brilliant idea.

    Still, the fantastic user experience is what keeps people coming back again and again.

    Airbnb

    With their recently added ability to book a room instantly, having a clean-cut mobile presence has become a necessity for Airbnb. Similar to their innovative website, their mobile app is uncomplicated, smooth, and straightforward.

    Image Source: Airbnb

    The user puts in where they want to stay, what dates, and how many guests they will have – and they immediately get a selection of dozens of homes that meet their needs right at their fingertips.

    User-Centric Design Creates The Customer Development Basis 🧩

    Finally, when your work impacts people every day — think carefully about how they feel, put yourself in their shoes, and listen to them. Start using UCD now to create your impact in the future.

    Industrial designers realized that user experience mattered decades before we were born. That's why, today, it still makes people envious if you own an Olivetti typewriter or a Braun stereo.

    Being a user-centered designer is about believing that as long as you stay grounded in what you've learned from people, your team can arrive at unique solutions that the world needs and that will help achieve business goals.

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    The value system of user-centered design contains empathy, optimism, iteration, creative confidence, belief in making, embracing ambiguity, and learning from failure

    Be brave to learn from the users. Don't be the fish who didn't know it was in the water.