Main Menu
Home
Research
Consultancy
Coaching
Mentoring
Usability & Design
About Us
What is Usability?
User-Centred Design
Usability Testing
|
User-Centred Design
User-centred design
helps create products that fit with the way people think, live
and work: products people can use successfully, and will
want to use.
There are widely accepted 'best practices': things
that help ensure the design meets the real needs of users. But
many projects find that it can be difficult to fit these user-centred
essentials into their development process.
Our services
We can help you decide what kind of user-centred
approach is best for your project's
success, and then assist you with particular steps in the process if
required. For example:
- needs analysis: eliciting and understanding user
requirements
- context analysis (including user profiles and
task analysis)
- facilitating user workshops
- setting usability objectives linked to business
goals
- ensuring designs meet usability standards and guidelines
- integrating usability testing into the
development cycle
To get good outcomes, it is important to integrate
design and evaluation.
Few designs are right first time around, so some tightly managed
iteration is usually required to achieve an acceptable design -- and
it is cheaper to make the changes early. We can help you with:
- low fidelity prototyping (rapid iteration)
- high fidelity prototyping
- practical ways to improve design through
usability
testing
A model user-centred approach can be
summarised as follows:
It is best to follow user-centred principles from
the outset. But in practice, there are many ways of ensuring
that a product becomes more user-centred at any stage of the
product development. We have a lot of
experience in doing this commercially. We also contributed
to some of the research work that helped to establish modern
user-centred methods (see our
publications). Find out more
To discuss what you want to achieve and how we
may be able to help, please email
Miles Macleod
or telephone us on +44 (0)1932 844 449 (UK business hours)
|
|
How to make your product more usable
There may be no magic
formula, but there are plenty of simple things that can help
ensure good usability.
Make sure you understand your
intended users - what it is they value, want they want
achieve, what they find easy or frustrating about equivalent
products.
Always 'walk through' designs
from a user's viewpoint. And get independent usability
experts to review the design.
Do a lot of hands-on user
testing. Try out design ideas on target users from the early
stages.
Look beyond focus groups --
it is one thing to speculate about what might be nice, quite
another when faced with the reality of using a product.
Test prototypes on users,
giving them real things to do without external help or
guidance. You'll soon spot what works and what needs to be
changed or improved.
Make sure you are prepared to
change things that don't work or that users dislike.
|
