Why user-centred design?

User centred, or UX (or UCD), web design is a practical design philosophy that puts the user at the heart of web design.

By seeking to understand the needs and desires of users from the beginning of the design process we can create online experiences that are a pleasure to use, and that customers come back to again and again.

There is no business without customers, without users. Users of new media, be it a website or a mobile phone application, are impatient. They will assess whether a website is for them in seconds or less. If they do stay, but encounter problems, they won't come back.

Websites need to communicate to users instantly and allow them to obtain what they are looking for easily.

User centred design was developed so as to avoid costly the mistakes that come from not properly considering why and how a user will use a product from the outset.

E-Consultancy has estimated that investment in user centred design returns six times what you put in.

A multi-disciplinary approach

UX web design realises that all the elements that go into the creation of a website should be considered holistically. It is important that all the constituent parts of the website are considered together. Stakeholders representing the different elements – coders, writers, graphic designers, project managers, marketeers, etc – need to involved in requirements gathering and solutions definition.

Core UX team members will be typically multi-discplinary practicioners.

The elements of web design

There are a number of elements that typically input into any website. These are:

Body content (on-page written content)
Header content (metadata)
Graphic design
Information architecture
Interface design
Interaction design
Programming

There is some variation in what UX designers consider these elements to be. Some may include sound and animated or video content.

Some practioners may quibble about whether information architecture (what pages, service, tools etc are on the website and how they are arranged in relation to each other and how they are link) and interface design (how elements of page furniture are arranged on the page) as part of the same larger discipline.

The point is to realise that these distinct elements will have to be harmoniously blended to deliver a site or page that a user will experience as a unified whole.

The elements of UX design practise

Understanding wh your users are

Users are of course central to UCD design practise. Broadly speaking there are two sets of users. These are:

Business users – the organisation/person/product that the website is being for
End users – the customer

In order to satisfy these two sets of users it is important to understand what they want, including those things they cannot consciously conceptualise, and those things they don't know they want because they have not encountered them yet.

Gathering user requirements

To acheive this takes research. User centred design has a number of techniques for uncovering and understanding user requirements. These include:

Card sorting
Personas, user journey's, and scenarios
Ethnography and fieldwork
Workshops
Usability testing
Competitor analysis
Web analytics

Solution testing

Frequent testing, early and often, is one of the hallmarks of UX design. It is not enough to come up with a solution that works technicially if it doesn't work for people.

User testing can be expensive, but is doesn't have to be.

The basic tools of user testing are the wire-frame and the prototype.

Because the testing has to be done early and quickly, early testing can be done with hand sketched page layout. Cad