Do you want to understand your users better? Here are a few simple suggestions for successful, user-centred design
- Make user-focus an explicit target of your design projects and the responsibility of every team member (researchers, project managers, designers and engineers), whether or not they are directly involved in user research.
- Give user-focus status by appointing a user champion on each project team and including him or her in high-level planning meetings.
- Schedule time and budget for user research, analysis and feedback throughout the project plan. Time for team feedback is particularly important to ensure research findings are integrated into the ongoing design work.
- Allow time and budget to recruit people who really are the target users of future products and services. (Avoid using the same people for research across a range of projects.)
- Engage with users early on in your design process. Assumptions regarding user need may have a long history and some preconceptions may need to be overturned. Ensure that research is not only carried out but reported back to the project team.
- Use techniques such as video or photographic compilations to make users' experience vivid for members of the design team who have not been involved in research. Display images and user-stories in your project space, to maintain the users' 'presence'.
- Work together as a team to interpret the research findings and their implications for design work - don’t assume that simply doing and presenting the research is enough. Represent your interpretation in a memorable way that can be referred to during the project. This could be, for example, a diagram of user priorities and needs, a checklist of key attributes design proposals must have, a catch-phrase to keep consciousness of the specific users you have researched, or scenarios of future users that bring together what you have understood through observation and where you plan to develop for the future.
- Prototype and gather user feedback as early as possible in the design process (prototypes may simply be written scenarios initially, then develop through rough prototypes to working models).
- Keep perspectives fresh by iterating design evaluation with users who have had no involvement with your project so far, as well as those who have been involved in observation or earlier stages of evaluation.
- Guarantee the people you observe confidentiality and assure them that they are helping you evaluate your work rather than being evaluated in any way themselves.
- Keep research sessions as intimate as possible. A large design team presence can inhibit research participants. If several people from the design team are to be involved in research it may be better for them to do research individually and then bring findings together, rather than engaging with participants as a team.