What Is User-Centered Design Methods: Three Methods

In a user-centered design approach – user experience design – we attempt to think often about client fulfillment and prosperity, regardless of whether that is an important word. By and large, the goals are principally self-serving and worthwhile. It’s ergonomics and involvement with the help of capital. In any case, it’s as good as it gets than nothing.

Consequently, the plan subsequently characterized requires an impact on point of view and usual inventive methodology for the conventional method that specific expert figures should go with. A user-centered design method takes shape in a classic project cycle. To get to the point, in the user-centered design method (= in the UX design method), there are three steps:

1. Analysis
2. Design
3. Assessment

Analysis

The analysis phase makes it possible to take stock of the objectives that the digital project must meet : business objectives, expectations and needs of end customers. It is a question of identifying the points of meeting – the point of stumbling between supply and demand. To orient the value proposition on characteristics likely to penetrate in a subtle and less brutal way in the mind of the end customer. Yes, it’s marketing. Let’s repeat it.

Design

The design phase follows the analysis phase: it aims to provide design solutions likely to respond to the diagnosis and the project’s general objectives (business flow and user flow). The UX designer seeks to bring these two flows together in search of a magic formula that would make it possible to hit the jackpot on the business side while bringing satisfaction on the user side. Sketching out design solutions is tricky, exciting, uncertain work and we’ll get to that a little later when we talk about web design methods.

Evaluation

The evaluation phase is the one that measures design solutions with end users or customers. There is an arsenal of methods dedicated to evaluating the quality of the user experience. However, most of the time, it is the user interface that is evaluated, and not the experience … Indeed, the digital industry, in its first phase, sought to balance the experience on the ergonomic qualities of the interface (ergonomic audit, user test). The current stage aims to measure the quality of the experience, but this notion of experience is still very much attached to the user behind the screen. 

There is, therefore, more interface measurement than experience measurement related to general considerations of the company. In the next cycle, it will finally be a question of measuring everything, the company and the service delivered, more than the support that delivers the service… Companies such as Amazon or Google have already succeeded in balancing this equation. The user-centered design method considers these three stages as a loop, that is, a cycle in which the digital product undergoes constant improvement, from analysis to design, through evaluation . 

The fundamental concept of the method is brilliant but only sometimes easy to apply or easy to maintain over the long term. But it is a solid base to support the design process. The user-centered design approach is a method within the method, a project within the project. Indeed, the UX design method fits into the conduct of the project in general, of which it is a part. The production phase and the recipe (technical test) must be added to the UX method.

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