The nature and quality ... Read more about 'Kick start your customer experience – June 26th']]> What is customer experience anyway?

In a nutshell, it’s the overall effect of a brands communications, interactions, touchpoints and exposures on an individual throughout their entire relationship with a business – from awareness through to advocacy. It requires good planning, design and management across a business to bring it together.

Is customer experience really important?

The nature and quality of customer experience drives levels of engagement, sales, loyalty, and advocacy.

It has become more and more apparent over the last few years that there is a significant need for businesses to spend more time getting to grips with customer experience.  Not just customer experience management systems, but also the planning, the vision and the design of customer experiences so that they are inspiring, differentiating and successful.

Where should I start?

To help us all do a better job in creating a customer experience that our clients appreciate Webcredible is launching the Customer Experience Forum.

What could be better than to spend the day with customer experience guru’s as well as great brands such as Orange and Dulux at the beautiful RSA House to get great insight, best practice, and practical help that will get your brand and business on the right path?

June 26th – reserve the date!

The Customer Experience Forum is designed to give you, as Brand Director, Head of Marketing, CMO, Digital Manager insight into how to get on the right path with customer experience; we will give you knowledge and practical tips so you can build customer experience into your businesses and brands.

With great talks and workshops on the customer experience design process, customer research, future trends, experience strategy, content strategy, innovation, getting a great website, mobile design, innovation and more you’ll come away with plenty of new ideas to take back to your teams.

So don’t miss out! Put June 26th in your diary, see more info and register for the forum of the year. Hope to see you there!

Scott, our new visual designer, had been working on giving our training manuals a much needed update. We will have new manuals to go with the new courses we are planning to roll out in the near future! If you have any feedback on the design of the ... Read more about 'What’s happening at Webcredible']]> It has been an exciting month at Webcredible.

Scott, our new visual designer, had been working on giving our training manuals a much needed update. We will have new manuals to go with the new courses we are planning to roll out in the near future! If you have any feedback on the design of the manual (I know it’s only the front cover) it would be greatly appreciated.

One of our new user experience courses, interaction design and prototyping, ran for this first time last month. The feedback from the course was outstanding, so well done Clara and Yeevon, our awesome trainers. We are also running our other new course, ethnography, for the first time this month (May 24th).

I would also like to publicly welcome Danny Weston, our new client services director, to Webcredible.

Probably the most exciting news of the past month is that building on the success of our past ux roundtables we will be running our first ever 1-day customer experience event. At the moment all I can reveal is that it will be for brands only and the venue is the RSA house, London. Expect more information next week, so keep your eyes peeled!

The award, which was chosen from 98 ... Read more about 'GOV.UK – Deserved winners?']]> The GDS (Government Design Service) were greeted with some pretty exciting news yesterday, not only had they won the ‘Designs of the Year 2013′ award for their category, digital, but they also won the overall design award. For the GOV.UK website. Yes, a government website won a design award.

The award, which was chosen from 98 entries, was presented at an awards ceremony in South London on Tuesday. They beat other nominees such as The Shard and the Olympic Cauldron.

What was surprising is that it was not a stunning design (it was good, but I don’t quite agree that it was “the Paul Smith of websites”). In fact if I were to be critical, it’s not very engaging. With the questionable quality of the search function  you often find yourself navigating through numerous lists, click by click, to arrive at your destination. You can go through a number of different pages without even coming across an image.

So, in my opinion it has not done anything particularly revolutionary on the design front, something which pretty much all of our office agrees upon.

How did they win the ‘designs of  the year’ award without having a stunning design?

This is where we get excited. The GDS followed an agile, user centered design process (as they have publicised on their blog). Their website is primarily focused on providing actual users with the best possible experience, to use their tagline “user needs not government needs”.

One of our consultants commented that it’s not what the design looks like but what it has accomplished that is so impressive. A sentiment I agree with.

From our point of view, this is why they won. To carry out a successful user centered design project of this scale, for a public facing website, is revolutionary.

This is great for user experience design. We know UX is a growing market but this has really highlighted what user centered design can achieve. Bravo, GDS.

What would you have voted for as your design of the year? Does the GOV.UK website deserve to have won?

It’s an exciting time for our training academy, we have new courses and big plans!

Our two new user experience courses are ethnography and interaction design and ... Read more about 'What’s happening at Webcredible']]> March has been incredibly busy. We won some large projects, including international ones, and ran a wealth of private training for which we  created some completely bespoke training courses.

Training Academy

It’s an exciting time for our training academy, we have new courses and big plans!

Our two new user experience courses are ethnography and interaction design and wireframing. We are very excited about these courses, they are a going to be a great addition to our user experience stream. Interested? Both of these courses are being run for the first time this month.

In other training related news we have also created a video for our usability testing course. We hope it will help people understand a bit more about usability testing and what they will learn on our course.

In conjunction with our training video we also ran a small competition. Congratulations to Tony and Jez, enjoy your champagne!

New staff

We’re growing! As well as a new Client Services Director starting soon, we are very pleased to welcome Scott Abbott, the latest addition to our design team and Carla Bettencourt-Gomes our new office manager.

Events

Pete and I attended a FTSE 350 Masterclass roundtable event.  I presented to the audience and then we hosted 6 roundtable discussions on user experience with digital people that work for a variety of FTSE 350 brands. I also attended a Figaro Digital event last week.

The research techniques that we’ve typically used over the years – interviews, focus groups, diary studies, ethnography – are all great but have one main limitation: We ... Read more about 'Google Glass – the future of our user research']]> We’re delighted to announce today that Webcredible has taken the decision to use Google Glass for all of our research activities, recording real-time customer behaviour for our clients 24/7.

The research techniques that we’ve typically used over the years – interviews, focus groups, diary studies, ethnography – are all great but have one main limitation: We can only track what people are doing for a short period of time. Until now that is, where we can offer our clients 24/7 access to their customers.

How it works

We’ve developed an application that enables us to live stream video from Google Glass. Our application tracks tiny movements in the cornea – the part of the eye which does the focusing – and records on to our computers exactly where participants’ eyes are looking. When we compare this to the live streamed footage we get a map of how participants view the world (and your products)! A team of our consultants have been working 24/7 in shifts to analyse participants’ every move. Sounds a bit Big Brother-esque? It is!

Our biggest concern was that participants would remove their glasses so we’ve set it up so they’re delivered a short sharp electric shock if the glasses are removed. At first we thought this was a bit harsh but we’ve had our lawyers come up with a pretty robust waiver for participants to sign. This is especially important for participants that have pacemakers.

One of our first guinea pig participants, ironically called Crystal Glass, told us:

“It took some getting used to wearing the glasses all the time, especially when sleeping. I soon learnt not to remove them or knock them off in my sleep though as the electric shocks were quite painful! I’m glad I could contribute to this research study nonetheless.”

Why we’re doing this

Participants wear the glasses for 2-3 weeks and we collate huge amounts of information during this period. We then analyse the raw data and  produce a report to give our clients a detailed understanding of how they can best cater for (and/or exploit) potential and existing customers. Other exciting things we’re finding out include:

• Glass’s ability to take photos and video with a “you are there” view really excites us. It captures moments, events, actions just the way the participant sees it.
• Preliminary tests suggest that Glass is not an invasive piece of tech (at least to everything other than privacy) and we expect research participants  to literally forget we are following their every move.
• Based on where participants are looking and for how long (as well as numerous other metrics) we’re able to judge moods to certain events, objects and products. It’s now possible to test products and services over a significant period of time with high levels of accuracy.
• Our clients can have participants sent tasks direct to the retina display using Glass’s in built messaging features.

Privacy concerns

There’s of course been a lot of talk lately about Google Glass and the associated privacy debate, which we’ve followed carefully. We interviewed all of the participants about the experience and they generally seemed OK with it. One of our early beta testers, Mona Lott, mentioned that it took some getting used to wearing Google Glass: “I didn’t feel that wearing the glasses was… necessary while I went to the bathroom. However, I was assured that all footage was confidential and the electric shocks ensured that I complied.”

Despite the privacy concerns and our increased electricity bills we’ve still opted to go ahead with using Google Glass for all our research (our lawyers really did write an excellent waiver for participants to sign). Apparently the shocks were painful and have led to injuries – rest assured, we are investigating these claims but again, thanks to our lawyers, we should be fine whatever the outcome.

By way of compensation for the invasion of privacy, we offer an increased incentive to participants if we capture any… ahem… intimate moments.

In conclusion… Big Brother research is the future!

Despite the privacy issues we believe Google Glass provides an invaluable opportunity for our clients. We’re now in the process of replacing all our research methods with this new technology, providing our clients with a 360 degree view of customer behaviour.

Tell us what you think about our bold decision to use Google Glass for all research – comment below or Tweet us @webcredible with hashtag #BigBrotherResearchWithElectricShocks.

I took the time to look at it because not only is it popular but it’s a shining example of how to design an application that incorporates multiple features ... Read more about 'UX Review: KAYAK travel app']]> ‘Kayak‘ is a tech company ‘focused on making online travel better’. With 20 million+ downloads their travel app is one of the most popular on the market.

I took the time to look at it because not only is it popular but it’s a shining example of how to design an application that incorporates multiple features into one simple, user friendly application. Oh, and it also does mCommerce pretty well.

Highlights:

• Clear and big call-to-actions
• Same features as desktop version
• Comprehensible sorting filters across all features
• Map/list option and the map runs really quickly and shows consolidated results, e.g. 5+ hotels in the same area appear under the same tab when map is zoomed out
• Generally, the app is quick and light
• The auto-fill option is brilliant, and for an app which requires a lot of information at regular intervals this can really save a lot of time
• There is a ‘Guest login’ option if you book via Kayak, another great time saver for making purchases on a mobile device

Areas (small) for improvement

• Calendars could be more contextual, so that they don’t show previous weeks
• Some icons and information isn’t intuitive. For example,   looking for flights a number appears on the right side, but it’s not immediately clear what it stands for
• As per our recent mCommerce study we know that security is very important to users making purchases on mobile devices. While the Kayak app does display a symbol (padlock) close to where you enter credit card details, it could provide more reassurances, especially give the high value nature of purchasing hotels or flights
• If you chose not to pay via Kayak the checkout process largely depends on how good website is to which you are redirected, a necessary evil for bargain hunters

Like being suckered into pulling open a ... Read more about 'The best and worst user experience moments in the movies']]> As a UX professional, I suffer/benefit from the syndrome that it’s impossible to see a designed interaction and not make an instant evaluation of it. It makes frustrating interactions even more frustrating because I’m aware of the lack of care taken by the designer – I know it’s preventable.

Like being suckered into pulling open a door that has a handle and discovering it can only be pushed open. The handle is a compelling affordance for pulling but the designer didn’t bother to think it through or heaven forbid user test it. Of course, the same syndrome gives me a kick when something is brilliantly designed, so it balances out.

But it’s a syndrome that can’t be switched off. Even when watching films.

Man-machine interfaces can make for special moments in movies – the high tension when they go wrong, the efforts to make something like a computer screen that’s essentially dull look interesting, and the sheer invention that comes from speculating what our future will look like.

So in celebration of the expert-review-syndrome-that-once-awakened-can-never-be-switched-off for UX professionals everywhere, here’s my list of classic man-machine moments – good and bad.

Terminator – selecting from programmed responses

So, Arnie’s terminator is holed up in grim rented accommodation because wounds on his flesh coating are showing the machine bits underneath. The landlord is hassling him. Arnie could perhaps punch through the door and silence the pest but he needs to blend in.

We witness the terminator selecting from a worryingly limited set of verbal responses. It isn’t really plausible that a sophisticated AI masquerading as a human being would have to read these English text options from some kind of retina display – a case of spectacular over-engineering. But we get the sense of how functional Arnie is. And, hey, he makes the right choice all right.

Casino Royale – the poison antidote kit

Luckily, when Bond is poisoned during the poker game he has a poison-antidote kit with a direct line back to the office. Unluckily, the kit is quite complicated and surprisingly not very robust. He has to link his mobile phone to a blood sample detector and spike his skin whilst making an emergency call to the boffins at HQ.

The poison is duly analysed but after selecting the right antidote he has to restart his heart with a separate stand-alone defibrillator (wouldn’t it be better if the defibrillator could be kicked off remotely by the boffins?) Worse still, the defibrillator is attached to a power pack via a very flimsy removable lead. No matter that the defibrillator has a nice clear call to action – the good old red button. Nice display of user frustration with Bond repeatedly pressing the useless control. Handy then that the Bond girl has spent some time working in IT support – the problem is clear. Plug it in, Bond.

Aliens – motion tracker display

A master class in using poor technology to ramp up the tension. A motion tracker is a great feature to have on a massive pulse gun when you’re trapped on all sides by advancing aliens. But the display only shows the horizontal distance and direction that your worst enemy is lurking.

It seems to be an equipment malfunction when the display tells our heroes that aliens are within touching distance. If they’re in the room then why can’t we see them? But the equipment doesn’t lie – the pesky critters are just 5 metres away, in the ceiling. The display doesn’t give a reading for the vertical range – or maybe the display has been deliberately simplified for combat situations and the fault is with training. Or the manual.

Seems like a reasonable user mistake to me – should definitely have been picked up at the early prototype stage.

Aliens – Ripley’s power loader

You may well wonder at the point of an early scene in the film where Ripley gets to display her prowess at shifting containers around with an exo-skeleton power loader. But it all becomes clear when she’s got an angry alien queen to dispose of.

Whenever you see technology of this kind being showcased with its intended use you can be sure that it will be used for less conventional purposes later on. I love the clunky JCB look of this device – it’s clearly a no-nonsense piece of functional kit, built on a budget, hence the rather rudimentary push-button keypad for choosing tools.

Ripley shows admirable user patience under pressure in choosing the blowtorch function when locking horns with a lethal monster. Expert users only.

Blade Runner – the image scanner

Deckard is on the trail of rogue replicants. He analyses an electronic image with a scanner using voice commands. It’s a fascinating speculation of the future from 1982 when Blade Runner was made. And it makes for good cinema. Deckard isn’t just silently manipulating the image with a mouse or pointer – we watch his thought processes and his skill, the blind alleys he explores and backtracks from.

But does it make UX sense? Well, as a hands-free interaction it allows the hero to drink his way through a bottle of the hard stuff. But manipulating rich visual data with voice commands? What are these dimension numbers he’s quoting – and without scale guides how does he know which numbers to quote? Touchscreen or hand gestures would be the more efficient way to go – the task is spatial. It’s a bit like asking Siri to make delicate edits in a Photoshop application.

There is no consistent or reliable way to describe what you want to achieve in such a visual application using natural language – the opportunities for the interface to misinterpret are too great. So, you need pre-determined commands, which are inflexible and need to be memorised. It looks cool but the drawbacks of voice control are laid bare. Voice activated interfaces are often tipped to be the future but I’m not convinced.

Monsters v Aliens – all-out nuclear war or a latte

The President has two identical, unlabelled, enormous red buttons positioned next to each other in his emergency command-room bunker – one to launch all nuclear missiles, one to make a refreshing latte. A classic case of poor usability! The calls-to-action are easily noticed but indistinguishable from each other. Not dissimilar to placing OK and Cancel buttons next to each other and not using visual design to distinguish them.

So, maybe the consequences of choosing the wrong button aren’t quite as catastrophic as in Monsters v Aliens but there are times when as a user I’ve lost my precious work to such design shortcomings and felt like unleashing all-out nuclear war…

Prometheus – self-surgery machine

Shaw has a reasonably pressing user need – to remove the alien growing inside her. Luckily she has access to a state-of-the-art self-surgery machine. She frames the solution to her problem as a caesarean section. It makes sense – she’s been contaminated through sexual intercourse, her original diagnosis was pregnancy, but the birth isn’t likely to be a beautiful experience.

Unluckily the machine is just configured for men. Watching Shaw wrestle with the interface to find an alternative solution that the machine is configured for is one of the most gripping scenes in the film. How many times have we squared up to an interface that won’t do what we want but because the need is great we persist, looking for more and more desperate ways to hit success?

Shaw rephrases the problem – she makes it gender non-specific. Sci-fi is littered with fantastically annoying, rigid and over-literal interfaces – they serve to contrast the difference between humans and so-called smart machines.

Prometheus – the bridge of the Engineer ship

Fancy massive-scale computer screen or holographic interfaces that showcase the visual design credentials of special effects companies are ten-a-penny. Given that their true function in a film is to fill in potentially tedious back-story, they can grate on a UX practitioner. Why the storm of digits when the machine is only doing is some internal processing that wouldn’t be comprehensible to a person anyway? It’s like throwing half the budget of the film to make the equivalent of a revolving hourglass look pretty.

The holographic console of the Engineer ship in Prometheus is a refreshing exception – a truly stunning 3D map of galaxies that resolves itself to planet Earth. It’s a chilling moment – the Engineers have programmed our home as their destination for biological weapons of mass destruction. The bewitching mass of swirling data helps communicate how alien the Engineers are – for them this complex interface is actually user-friendly! They must be a different order of smart.

2001: A Space Odyssey – HAL

HAL is the original malfunctioning AI in this influential sci-fi vision. As the all-powerful master of the US spaceship Discovery One, HAL illustrates the ultimate risk of abdicating our responsibility for control to machines. HAL calculates that the human crew are jeopardising the ship’s mission and since it considers concerns for human safety as secondary to the mission objectives, the crew must go.

Its devious intelligence in committing murder is made more disturbing by its perfectly rational voice and disembodied presence. You can’t see HAL – just its camera eye observing human behaviour dispassionately. When the last crew member, Bowman, duels HAL for supremacy of the ship, there is no easy way to power HAL down.

Oh for CTRL-ALT-DEL or a power button or a plug in a socket! When machines become autonomous, smarter than us and embedded in every aspect of our networked, manufactured world, there will be no easy way to switch them off. Perhaps switching them off will be more dangerous than leaving them on? Who would fly the ship without HAL to run things? HAL’s slow demise to kindergarten rhymes and machine death as Bowman grimly pulls out every one of its processors is compelling.

In fact, when I force my flaky Windows PC to shut down after all the applications have frozen, I too want the satisfaction of hearing it sing Daisy in a warped voice.

Minority Report – personalised advertising

It’s the Holy Grail of the retail world – to deliver location-specific personalised advertising content. So the technology has now duly arrived to push notifications to customers as they pass by physical stores, but witness the nightmare conclusion of this in Minority Report and you’ll wish to return to pre-industrial barter economy days. Anderton has a black market eye transplant to evade identification on the run. But biometric devices pick up his stolen identity and push cheesy content meant for his dead donor.

There are no barriers between user and content in this vision – no simple way to opt out, change settings or even look away. The personalised holographic hoardings jump out of nowhere – the equivalent of insistent visual spam that lurks in waiting for us wherever we turn. The more we trade privacy for convenience or cost, the closer we edge to this reality. Google Glass is just around the corner. Perhaps in the same way that we opt for free access to Spotify content in return for being fed adverts, we will trade the control of what we see for access to augmented vision or customer discount.

The curse of the user experience professional

Casting the world through a user experience lens is the curse of the UX professional! So, now you know that we never switch off – even when we’re at the movies. And beware, if you sign up for an HCI qualification, be prepared for your pain threshold to cope with badly designed interfaces to plummet.

It’s easy:

But how about ... Read more about 'B2B customer experience – hot topic?']]> Customer experience is a hot topic. Job titles such as Head of Customer Experience and Chief Customer Officer are starting to appear, these individuals are the driving force for the ‘voice of the customer’ and shows how businesses are starting to take customer experience strategy, design and management seriously by making someone accountable for it.

But how about in the Business-to-Business (B2B) arena? Is customer experience a ‘hot topic’?

The B2B realm has historically been significantly behind the curve in terms of customer experience as Forrester research found in their 2011 industry surveys. Forrester went as far to say that the B2B businesses had a lower level of customer experience than the worst of the consumer brands. Scathing!

Now, if customer experience wasn’t important in the B2B industry then that would be no surprise and not really anything much to write home about. So the first thing to do is to work out if B2B businesses should prioritise customer experience at all.

Is B2B customer experience beneficial?

Here are a few areas where customer experience can support your B2B business:

1. Cost saving: It costs a lot of money to gain new customers and get into a trust position to be able to grow those accounts so a positive customer experience that supports your customer can take away their strains and increase their loyalty.
2. People talk: B2B often runs on word-of-mouth marketing so remember the personal elements, it’s a mistake to think that you are just dealing with a machine that has service level agreements.
3. Grow your customers: A more trusting relationship means you can work closer with your clients, often increasing their spend with you and you can support them to grow through innovation in their supply chain.
4. Differentiation: Customer experience could be a lucrative differentiator in addition to the traditional price competitive market.

Those three reasons aside, customer experience is key for any business as even at its most basic it represents the optimisation of products, communications and services to make interactions more efficient.

B2B customer experience should be a hot topic and a core part of B2B business plans and management.

Where should B2B businesses start?

Customer experience management is actually much more complicated for B2B businesses, mostly due to the number of people involved in decision making and the forward usage of products and services (I.e. the customers of the customer, which could be internal to your customer organisation or external continuing the supply chain).

This means that there are a lot more experiences to measure, manage, plan for and create and it also makes it much more important. So where should you start?

Here are some ideas of where to start, questions to answer and what to consider to start getting your B2B customer experience up to scratch:

• Good experience: What is good customer experience anyway? Identify what customer experience you want to create from first contact to post-purchase service and beyond, identify what value would it add to your clients.
• Your experience: It’s not just about good experience, it’s about your brand experience and your brand personality, that’s how you can use customer experience to differentiate your business and services.
• Create journey maps: understand where you product or service reaches and see how you can measure, manage and improve the customer experience at each step.
• Segment with behaviours: Don’t just identify all the different job roles as there will be too many to manage. Try to identify all the different ‘customer types’ you have in one client organisation along the journey map. Then you can look across your different client organisations to create a handful of personas of the key influencers, purchasers and users.
• Get your teams together: it isn’t just the responsibility of marketing, customer service or account management. Connecting the dots behind the scenes within your organisation can help deliver an excellent customer experience.
• Don’t be complaisant: Remember, it can change so re-visit your research, amend your strategy and reaffirm the customer experience goals across your organisation.

The B2B market has huge scope for customer experience, and we are working with clients in different segments of this industry to try and do just that! Have you got any other questions about B2B customer experience, or any observations of great or bad customer experience that you’ve experience, let us know in the comments…

For me, this was an opportunity to dig into my personal repository of academic notes and online resources in an effort to define User-centred Design and User Experience, their guiding principles ... Read more about 'User-centred design – the fundamentals']]> Our programme manager, Clara Teoh, recently asked our UX team to contribute their thoughts to help in the preparation of our upcoming UCD training course.

For me, this was an opportunity to dig into my personal repository of academic notes and online resources in an effort to define User-centred Design and User Experience, their guiding principles and pitfalls. It was a reflective ‘back to the basics’!

I have read articles that consider Dieter Rams methodology and Apple’s design approach ‘user-centred’, but designing simple and user-friendly products doesn’t necessarily mean that the approach is user-centred. User-centred is often used as a buzzword and like any buzzword, it’s often misused.

At the same time, I stumbled upon discussion on various UX blogs questioning or defending the capabilities of user-centred design towards achieving innovation. This topic wasn’t new to me the different philosophies in design methodologies has been a hot topic for years, maybe since design was founded as a discipline.

My thoughts on UCD  will be separated into two posts: this one deals with the guiding principles of user-centred design and how you can implement them, while part two (coming soon!) will add to the ongoing discussion on Innovation vs. User-centred design.

What are the basic, guiding principles of ‘user-centred design’?

I find Gould and Lewis’ (1985) paper extremely useful in answering this question. In their article they argue there are three principles of designing for usability: early focus on users and tasks, empirical measurement and iterative design. As design principles they are timeless. Below I have tried to expand on these principles and update them for today’s user centred design processes.

Early focus on users and tasks

Focus must be given on understanding users’ behaviour, tasks and goals, their physical and cognitive characteristics and the context of use. How do you achieve this? The most insightful way is to conduct some qualitative research: observations in situ, interviews and even diary studies. Based on your research findings, create personas. Try to avoid any stereotypes and let the research findings speak. After the primary persona is chosen, design for his/her needs first.

In the worst case scenario when there’s no budget for user research, try to get hold of internal stakeholders that might know your target audience well. It’s likely that there are people in the client’s organisation that often get in touch with the target audience or they might have done some research in the past. Find these stakeholders and interview them.

Empirical measurement

Given the business goals and the user needs, it’s time to set the design objectives. Critical parameters or even your KPIs, which are quantifiable, can also inform design decisions. Sketching, wireframing and prototyping are key to the design process, as they allow measuring the design concepts against the quantified goals.

There are various methods with which the designs can be tested. The most popular is usability testing. Start by testing concepts, wireframes and finally high-fidelity prototypes. From my experience, lo-fi prototypes are good for testing the information architecture, the flows and the navigation. After replacing ‘lorem ipsum’ with real text, choosing a readable but attractive font, and adding all the important visual elements the prototype is ready to be tested for its content and aesthetics. Obviously you won’t get any valid statistical data from usability testing, but it will reveal issues that you did not design for.

Again, in the worst case where the tight budget doesn’t allow for participants’ recruitment, A/B testing (link) is a good alternative but it requires an intelligent setup of the site’s analytics. Another alternative is stakeholder workshops, in which you can share your sketches and take some feedback from people who have close relationship with end-users. However, doing only this might be dangerous because these people will approach the design from their own – often the organisation’s – perspective which might conflict with users’ point of view.

Iterative design

Allow time for trial and error. Who gets the whole design right in the first attempt? Now that the results from the empirical experiments are known, allocate time for review and problems fixing. Rapid iterative prototyping can be really fun and flexible, as it allows tweaking the prototype within half an hour between the usability testing sessions. Therefore, using the rights tools for the proper occasions is also crucial.

Remember that no design is final. Some needs and behaviours change vastly over time. Iterations on the same product might last for years and must be continuous. The ideal would be that you follow all of the aforementioned principles, but this is not the case if you have to face tight budgets and deadlines.

It’s easy to distinguish a user-centred design process which involves users (as discussed above) and the ‘user-centred’ design that focuses the experience around the user in the sense that an organisation might care for their users, they might want to satisfy their needs or promote their product as ‘useful’, ‘purposeful’, ‘usable’ and ‘ergonomic’, but they haven’t done any actual user-centred design.

Now I have explained what I think user-centred design is, next I will be sharing my view on the user-centred design and innovation debate, I know you can’t wait!

References

[1] Gould, J. and Lewis, C. (1985). Designing for Usability: Henry Ledgard Editor Key Principles and What Designers Think. Communications of the ACM, 28 (3), 300-311.