understand the user-centered design principles to build an outstanding User interface and user experience
User-Centered Design Overview
UCD is a design process that is iterative in nature. The concept of this design process is to focus on the users and understand their needs in order to create a product design that is enjoyable to the users. A framework can be created based on users’ expectations and desires to drive usability goals and successful product adaption. You as a designer will have the opportunity to create products alongside your user as you will be conducting user research, usability testing, user experience, and feedback.
User-centered design philosophy includes these major four-step breakdowns to successfully crack the process. First, is to understand the user, second, specify your users’ requirements, third, design the solutions based on the research, and lastly, evaluate and iterate until you get it right or at least close to it.
The goal of the user-centered design is to create a product from a user point of view and tailor it to their goals in order to increase user interaction. The smart hack in this process is to identify the users’ challenges and based on it try to design a product that will solve the problem and bring it effortless usability.
Know how you can incorporate the UCD principles into your design process with UI/UX courses in Pune and Mumbai.
To narrow down the process and provide you with a flow to understand the UCD philosophy, here are the seven principles of user-centric design.
Understand user needs and product use
To do this you will need to understand the user and identify their behavior pattern and how they interact with a product. You might need to create a checklist of questions that need to be filled up before you start a new project. Identify your users, their problems, their need for the product, and what they are expecting from the product. The idea is to get to know your users as much as possible to set up the design goals.
Early users involvement in the design phase
When your users are involved right from the beginning of your design process, you start collecting user feedback from the research stage itself. Your design will get better results if you frequently have the users involved during the design process. This can be done by gathering user reviews, product testing with users, interviewing users to validate the design concept that in turn can be useful to customers.
Keep your designs simple
As the entire purpose of UCD is to minimize the friction between the user and product usability, it is suggested you keep the product design basic and consistent. This means using easy and simple language, maintaining consistent interface elements, and only including information that is required. So when the users test or use your product, they should be able to do it with ease.
Create intuitive navigation
While designing a user-centric product, your goal should be to create a product that is easy for your users to understand and navigate. If your users are able to do that then your product can be a successful product of UCD. To make your product intuitive and effortless to use, you will need to ensure that you have added enough navigation cues, page indicators and scroll bars, easy to use the menu, and even a user onboarding section. Learn more about intuitive navigation with UX/UI design courses in Pune.
Feedback & Assistance
Your users might get stuck up across your product. You need to be ready to help them before they lose interest in using the product. Tooltips, info page/help page, contact us, pop-ups or even positive reinforcement can be used to counter user experience before it goes south. Instant help should be easily accessible to your user through the product itself before an actual human intervenes.
Deploy UCD approach in product delivery
UCD process can also be applied in product delivery. Why limit it till the service when UCD can be used to understand how the service is bought, installed, used, updated, and even uninstalled. All this can determine the user experience even before they open the application.
Leverage the iterative design process
Nothing is permanent. Even after your product is designed based on UCD and it is already released in the market, there are many chances where your product will be receiving user feedback. Designers need to collect these reviews, analyze them, reassess their designs and integrate them into future product updates.
Iterating on the final product with the available information can help ensure you create and deliver the desired product for your users.
So are you ready to start your career in UX designing, if yes then Felix-Its UX/UI training institute in Pune can be your right guide. With an aim to contribute some of the amazing designers to the design world, our UX/UI design courses ensure our learners get complete assistance in learning skills and tools required for the industry. Let’s get started!