User-Centered Design

Research provides knowledge.
Design makes it count. 

We complement our foundation of research services with a balanced approach to design.  By combining research-driven principles, business best practices, and aesthetic creativity, we help our clients create powerful, intuitive, and memorable products.

User Centric's Balanced Approach to Design from User Centric on Vimeo.

Our user-centered design tools include:

• Information architecture: Establishing a hierarchy and navigation that feels natural to users
• User interface design: Defining the layout and behavior in an iterative process of design, review, testing, and revision
• Interaction design: Creating a well-defined and usable presentation for complex interactions, animations, and other elements of the design that take place over time
• Graphic design: Adding visual aesthetics, color scheme, branding, icons, and other artwork
• Implementation support: Providing documentation, templates, and assistance to the development team, to help smoothly integrate the graphic design into the final product
• Design retainers: Providing ongoing assistance with changes and new elements, to help the design evolve with your product

What is user-centered design?

User-centered design is a multi-disciplinary approach to the design of things that people use. Some key features are:

1. Understand your users.
   • Goals: Understand what motivates people to use it.
   • Expectations: Earn their trust, confidence, and enthusiasm.
   • Capabilities: Provide what works best for them.
   • Needs: Improve their success rate.
2. Design for the user's end-to-end experience.
   • First impressions: Quickly engage and impress users.
   • User perspectives: Understand how different types of users will expect things to work.
   • Meaningful feedback: Always indicate "what this does" and "what just happened."
   • Problem handling: Guide users through or around problems when possible.
   • The big finish: Provide unmistakable indication of task completion.
3. Validate your results with users.
   • Ask and listen: Field research, interviews, and surveys can provide priceless insight.
   • Go right to the source: Usability testing with real users is the best way to validate the user experience.
   • Measure success: Defining the right metrics allows you to reliably measure the success, performance, and satisfaction of users.
   • Keep up with users: TODO about continuing to reveal and fix usability problems

UX Nuggets Blog: A Balancing Act: Walking the Tight Rope of User-Centered Design

Multiple disciplines allow us to approach design from a number of angles

• Understanding: Goals, requirements, technology, constraints, measures of success
• Principles: Cognition, perception, usability, accessibility, ergonomics
• Creativity: Vision, innovation, aesthetics, branding
• Success measures: Task completion, efficiency, performance, satisfaction
• User experience results: Trust, confidence, respect, enthusiasm
• Business results: Revenue, adoption, cost reduction, customer retention, customer loyalty