Importance of User Centred Analysis
What is User Centred Analysis?
It is the Active involvement of User with appropriate Function and User allocation over iterations to encompass whole User Experience. User Centred Analysis is the key to keep your design process smooth.
Whatever is being done, it is done to serve the users. Keeping USER at front, and centre, involving users at every stage helps designing better solutions.
User have their own Mental Models (which they can’t describe, but helps understanding products), when combines with the Conceptual Models of the Digital Interface avoid Usability Problems.
Good conceptual design of digital interfaces make things OBVIOUS that meets user Mental Model!
How do we make things Obvious?
To make things obvious we should give user visual and conceptual cues that help them accomplish tasks on an app/website. When things are obvious for user, they already know what needs to be done, where to locate which action and which action will lead to a certain result(Page/Screen). With this we reduce cognitive and motor load on user.
How making things obvious would reduce cognitive and motor load?Cognitive load would be reduces as user don’t have to put in lot of efforts to locate, and take action upon something. Therefore when things are up front there would be no motor load in going back and front to find or locate something.
For example: Any e-commerce application have a very similar product buying flow, users have a clear idea of steps to be taken for making a purchase online.
So now as we know about what and how UCA is beneficial for users and for designers, let’s take a look at how to get started with it
How to start with User Centred Analysis?
UCA as a whole is a big concept, required thorough and in-depth information about users. All the information is researched and then verified through interviews and interactions with actual USER.
The process to attain information about users begins with the following steps:
- Defining Design Strategy: A brief documentation which is prepared by designers, to show clear intent of the project. Including Goals, Scope, Plans and Evaluation Criteria.
- Creating Profiles and Personas: Once the design strategy is ready, start with creating profiles(including WHO, WHAT, WHERE and WHY). After profiles generate User Personas from the data collected.
- Conducting Interviews & Field Studies: To verify the personas you have created earlier with all the researched data, one on one interviews and field studies are conducted.
- Updation of Personas: Based on the new information collected through interviews and field studies, update the personas. Add demographics, more specific details that would help you make better decisions for designing overall digital experience of the product.
- Exploring User Journey Maps: To proceed ahead and know a little more about your users, we’ll draw out sample user journey maps. This would help exploring opportunities and pain points in the flow drafted.
- Defining Information Architecture: IA is about How is a website/app is organised. Basically the combination of all the buckets a user would explore to accomplish certain task. i.e, Under Doctors label there would be options to find a doctor and request an appointment.
- Getting into Design with Concept Sketching: After finalising IA now is the time to start sketching out sample screens. This would be completely based on the concepts, research and data you have collected so not necessarily be the only design. Iterations would refine the screens going ahead in the design phase.
More than 80% of the problems arrises from Usability issues, and UCA actually helps solving those problems. With UCA, take leverage of all the research, interviews and data to build the foundation of a good UX oriented product. At the it is about the results whether it is about redesigning an existing application or creating a new from scratch, UCA also helps evaluating ROI(Return on Investment). There are many studies and articles on the internet that shows, involving UX as a part of Agile and SDLC actually makes an IMPACT.
So that’s all for UCA, I hope this helps you to understand the the importance of bringing users in each step and leveraging all the data collected from user to make decisions. Support me by following me here and showing some love by hitting that clap button 😊
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