I recently needed a new pair of glasses. First, I checked out Moscot’s website, and their virtual try-on tool was fantastic. It felt almost like trying the glasses on in person.
The glasses I liked were a bit pricey, so I decided to look around and found similar frames on another site for less.
But then, ouch — the experience was a letdown.
There were no real-life pictures of people wearing the glasses — just poorly lit, generic shots. It was hard to get a sense of how the glasses would actually look on me.
In the end, despite the higher price, I went with Moscot. Their user-friendly design made the whole process easy and enjoyable. This showed me once again how important user-centric design is in influencing customers' decisions.
So, let’s break down the key principles and benefits of user-centered design. Once you get a handle on these, you’ll be ready to start designing and refining your own products.
Table of Contents
- What Is User-Centered Design?
- Why Is the User-Centered Design Process So Important?
- User-Centered Design Example
- Benefits of Implementing User-Centered Design Principles
- What Are the Main User-Centered Design Principles?
- What Is the User-Centered Design Process?
- Three Tips for Implementing User-Centered Design Principles
- User-Centric Products Require User-Centric Designers
What Is User-Centered Design?
User-centered design (UCD) focuses on product users. By implementing various research techniques, UCD incorporates the needs and feelings of users to guide each phase of product design and development. UCD also heavily emphasizes iteration — ideas are tested and redesigned to achieve usable, satisfying, and emotionally impactful products.
I get it — the concept of UCD might seem obvious. After all, users are the ones who are, well, using your product. Why wouldn‘t you prioritize what’s meaningful to them?
The main issue is that if we don‘t incorporate users throughout the process, other forms of bias can creep in and steer us away from what users want. Personal opinions, standard industry practices, business goals, and general resistance to change can all impact what designers think a product should be. This causes them to forget who they’re designing for. The result can be a product that isn't effective for users.
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Lindsay Derby, senior product designer on the sales enablement team at HubSpot, explains it best. "User-centered design is an iterative design approach that is fundamentally driven by making decisions based on the user needs,” she says.
Derby notes that this process involves a research phase in which designers need to fully understand the context of the use cases and specific user requirements. The designer will work to balance business objectives with these user needs to achieve the final design.
“User-centered design requires empathy for the users and balances the pragmatic approach needed for designing for a company or client. Design solutions are iteratively evaluated and improved, ideally by testing with actual or prospective end users,” Derby says.
Why Is the User-Centered Design Process So Important?
User-centered design brings our focus back to the user by prioritizing them and framing entire projects around their feelings, needs, and goals.
UCD does this by employing various exploratory research and ideation methods to understand the user comprehensively. Once this robust comprehension of the user is created, designers can use what they know to build a product they'll love.
Let the numbers speak instead of me:
- 88% of users won’t return to a website after a bad experience.
- Mobile users are five times more likely to abandon a site if it’s not mobile-friendly.
- Two-thirds of visitors prefer a well-designed site over a simple one.
- Over 90% of users don’t trust poorly designed sites.
According to Derby, a major reason UCD is so successful is that it considers how users naturally do things — and incorporates that into the design.
“User-centered design takes into account the user's natural way of doing things based on their inherent behavior and established mental models,” says Derby.
According to Derby, teams shouldn’t try to impose the design on the user and force people to adjust.
“We have all encountered UIs that try to force us to use the system in an unfamiliar way. It is confusing and often frustrating. User-centered design attempts to deliver a much more integrated and pleasing experience that will leave the user with a positive impression and also be able to complete the desired business objective without having to needlessly adapt,” she says.
Importantly, user-centered design isn‘t about understanding just any user — it’s about your users, the ones you envision using your specific product. UCD considers the characteristics of a target audience and what makes them unique, as this informs what they‘ll want to do with your product and how they’ll use it.
User-Centered Design Example
Wondering what user-centered design looks like in practice? Let me share some user-centered design examples.
Derby gives an example. If she is trying to sell clothing online and the end goal is for the user to complete a purchase, she will want to design the checkout experience in a way that is most closely aligned with how users shop.
"If we have research to support that most shopping at our website is done from mobile devices, it would make the most sense for us to design mobile-optimized checkout experiences like integrating with mobile pay, numeric keypad defaults, and large touchpoints,” she explains.
With those elements, she would have aligned the business goal to sell clothing with the user need for a smooth mobile checkout experience.
Derby adds that using a user-centered design approach adds a layer of confidence and strategy to design decisions while also showing empathy for the humans who will be interacting with your designs.
As I mentioned earlier, your UCD efforts should be tailored specifically to suit your users. For instance, a mobile navigation app targeted at city dwellers will probably look different from a mobile navigation app for mountain bikers. These users will value different things, even if the general aims of both apps are the same.
By the way, I saw a great post on X by a UX/UI designer Luke, who explained UCD as a 4D process — Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver — showing ongoing product improvement based on your community’s needs.
P.S. This super cool infographic made the 4D process totally stuck in my head:
Benefits of Implementing User-Centered Design Principles
UCD is an intensive process. I know at first it may seem like the resources needed to complete a cycle won't be worth it. But, time after time, implementing the user-centered design process will save you money for two reasons.
- First, UCD enables businesses to create better products that generate more revenue. Well-executed UCD produces products that align with users' needs and wants. Users are more likely to buy these kinds of products, which means more sales for you. Additionally, customers will be more satisfied with the product, build trust with your brand, recommend the product to others, and make more purchases down the road.
- Second, UCD saves on development costs by catching issues early and often. By involving users, you usually find out what works and what doesn‘t quickly, meaning you’ll need to make fewer revisions later. Imagine if you overlooked a critical issue post-launch — correcting that would be exponentially more costly than catching it early in the design phase.
What Are the Main User-Centered Design Principles?
The entire point of UCD is to see things from the perspective of your users in order to build delightful products and experiences. By putting aside your opinions and solving for the user, I guarantee you can more effectively build a product that will check all their boxes.
Empathy
Since the purpose of UCD is to see things from your users’ perspective so you can create delightful products and experiences, you must put yourself in their shoes. The user-centered approach requires you to put your opinions aside and solve for the user at each step.
User Involvement
Next up is user involvement. When you implement a user-centered design process, you will involve your users from the beginning of the project to the end. Having users involved at the start is helpful as you can better set requirements, and they can provide feedback or evaluate designs.
In my experience, by incorporating user input from the get-go, you‘ll save valuable time, energy, and money down the road because you won’t have to overhaul your whole design later in the project.
Alignment of Requirements
Next, designers who follow the UCD approach strive to meet the requirements of the business and the people who actually use the product. It's not always a given that these two will align.
Regular Feedback
Designers should be continually collecting feedback from users throughout the process to ensure that each decision matches up with user needs. This feedback can be both qualitative and quantitative.
Iteration
Even with consistent user input, you‘re probably not going to nail the design on your first try. That’s why user-centered design must be iterative: The design team ensures that the user experience continues to improve.
For example, I might discover something in my prototyping phase that reveals a misunderstanding of my users, requiring me to re-do my preliminary research. This isn‘t a bad thing. In fact, it’s expected.
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What Is the User-Centered Design Process?
While not every business follows the same exact process of UCD, I’ll take you through the five general steps that designers typically adhere to: Research, aligning requirements with the business, building solutions, testing solutions, and iterating on designs.
But before we dive into the process, I highly recommend watching the webinar with Joanne Moore from Made Tech. She offers brilliant insights into user-centered design. Here are some juicy tips from her talk:
- User-Centered Design Process: Understand, Concept, and Build. It’s an iterative process where you continuously learn, ideate, and test. The goal is to grasp the problem from the users' perspective and refine solutions through cycles of feedback and testing.
- Avoid Common Pitfalls: Moore highlights how starting with a rigid solution or talking to the wrong people can lead to failure. Instead, ask lots of questions and engage with true end-users to avoid costly missteps.
- Key to Success: Effective user-centered design involves early and ongoing user involvement, clear communication, and practical experimentation. This approach helps save time and money. And most importantly — it ensures the final product really, really meets users' needs.
Now, let's unpack each step in depth.
1. Research users to understand why and how they would use your product.
To design for your users, you first need to figure out who your users are. All UCD projects begin with in-depth research to determine:
- Who the users are.
- What obstacles they face.
- How and in what context they will interact with your product.
Outcome: By the end of this phase, you should have a clear understanding of why your target users would be interested in your company’s offerings.
1. Identify your target audience.
When identifying your target audience, try these methods:
- Surveys: Gather quantitative data about user preferences and behaviors.
- Interviews: Conduct one-on-one conversations to gain qualitative insights.
- Focus Groups: Engage with groups of users to discuss and obtain feedback.
- Ethnographic Research: Observe users in their natural environments to understand their behaviors and challenges.
I highly recommend checking out the wealth of UX software tools to make this easier.
2. Create a user persona.
From the information you collect about your target audience, begin developing user personas.
A user persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal user, allowing you to generalize a broader group with similar characteristics (such as goals, needs, behavior, attitude, role at their company, etc.).
The most important trait of your persona for the sake of the UCD process is considering what challenges they face. Try to uncover common difficulties among your research participants, as these will be the issues your product attempts to solve and where the value of your product comes from.
Pro tip: HubSpot's Make My Persona helps you create detailed buyer personas for better marketing, sales, and service. It offers a free, professionally designed template to map out your target market and refine your campaign segments based on existing marketing data.
3. Find out the context of use.
Lastly, find out your product's likely context of use — where, when, and how your persona will use your product. These details can all be included in your persona since they make your user base unique from others with similar challenges.
Let‘s continue with the navigation app example from earlier. Suppose I want to build a navigation/maps mobile app for mountain bikers. In that case, I can first talk to mountain bikers about problems they have by bringing some participants to the office and talking to them, or going out to the trails myself and talking to some (while they’re taking a break, of course).
From this work, I develop my persona, Mountain Bike Mike.
Mike loves exploring new trails in the area and typically bikes every weekend. However, one issue he‘s had with other apps is that he can’t track which routes he's explored before. This could be one of the main problems my app tries to address.
In Mike‘s persona, I’d also note that this application is used outdoors and on the move, almost always on a smartphone (though wearables aren‘t out of the question — either way, small screens), sometimes alone but often with a friend, and he’s probably in a more energized state while using the app as well.
If this seems like a lot of effort up top, that‘s because it is. However, this step is critical. You’re building a user-focused foundation to base your product development. Believe me, it‘s better to do the heavy lifting now than discover deep into the process that your designs are misguided and don’t actually provide users value.
2. Set requirements that align users’ goals with business goals.
With a good understanding of your users, you begin to define the scope of your project. You may find that your target demographic experiences many challenges, and it would be impossible to address all of them in the first iteration of your product.
So I recommend doing the following:
- Evaluate Features: Assess potential features based on their value to users and their return on investment for the business.
- Prioritize: Choose features that offer significant benefits and align with both user needs and business objectives.
This phase will also involve stakeholders outside of your design and research teams to decide which problems are most feasible to address now. And, if you discover that there‘s still some ambiguity about what your users want from a product, it’s okay to go back to step one. Better to be sure than move forward and risk a misguided product. Don't leave any questions unanswered.
In our mountain biking app example, some researchers might have floated the idea of a social networking aspect that allows users to connect with other riders and meet up at trails.
Even though this received some support from research participants, the product team ultimately decides that implementation would be too costly at this point, and it makes more sense to pursue the app's original proposed purpose, a mapping and navigation tool.
This isn't to say the social networking idea should be thrown out, just placed on the back burner for now.
3. Build solutions.
Now for the exciting part. I mean, research is exciting too, but this is the step when you can begin making all the materials you need to develop the product: user journey maps, user flows, wireframes, mockups, and eventually, high-fidelity prototypes for conducting user testing.
Design Evolution
Within this step, you‘ll iterate through many sub-steps as your designs evolve from low- to high-fidelity and your ideas become more concrete. It’s an exciting time.
Information Architecture
If you're building software, this is the phase to establish a clear information architecture — how the features and content of your product are grouped and structured in a way that's easy to understand. I found card sorting is a widely used method to determine information architecture. In this research method, participants arrange cards representing pages, content, and other information in the most logical way.
Testing and Alignment
Throughout this step, you can run miniature tests on your designs to confirm you‘re moving in the right direction, even before testing with fleshed-out prototypes. It’s easy to get carried away with ideas along the way, so I recommend you continue asking whether your building aligns with your preliminary user research and requirements. Are you still creating for your persona?
Perhaps in my mountain bike app design example, I assemble user flows to plan out how bikers use the app to discover new trails, conduct card sorting to learn which items should go in the primary user interface and which can be relegated to a settings menu, and then build the interface up from a wireframe to a prototype that isn't quite a finished product but is close enough to simulate it.
4. Test your prototype and get feedback.
With prototypes at the ready, you can now conduct usability tests with your intended user group and watch how they experience your product.
You can do it in two ways:
- Ask users to accomplish some tasks in your product.
- Observe their choices while taking notes on their actions and feedback.
Alternatively, you can give users your prototype in the environment they typically use it (i.e., mountain biking trails) and observe.
This practice, called contextual inquiry, produces valuable qualitative insights into what users like and could do without. Adding this to your user-centered design process gives you real-life information regarding what users love — and what they can do without.
You can also use the research methods from step one, like interviews and surveys, to gather as much information as you can about the current state of your design and how it solves users' problems. Take what you find, and check it against your initial goals for the project. How well is your product addressing the challenges of your persona?
While this process phase seems straightforward, I’ve found it can also be the most challenging phase to stay user-centric. And here’s why:
- You've spent lots of time and energy learning about users and building their ideal product.
- Finding issues with it can feel discouraging.
The thing is, your participants will find issues. It‘s rare to nail your product on the first try. You might even learn something you didn’t consider in prior stages. Stay patient and focused, and trust the process, even if it feels like the process is constantly putting obstacles in your way.
5. Iterate on designs.
You've finished your prototype testing. Did you get your product perfectly right on your first try? No? Then on to step five: Repeating the past four steps until your product is ready for the market.
Iteration is one of the core principles of user-centered design. These steps are designed to be retraced however many times necessary. You may need to go back one or several steps or repeat the entire process multiple times before your product is in a good place.
For instance, say I test a prototype of my mountain biking app and find that users generally like it, but there are some features they think could be improved. I can return to step three, redesign them, and test them again. Or, I might find my fundamental understanding of mountain bikers inaccurate. In that case, it's back to step one for more research.
Each time you iterate, ask yourself if there are any ways to improve your product and whether you've taken your user persona fully into account and met your product and business requirements for this product version.
When you reach this point, pat yourself on the back — you're doing great implementing user-centered design principles!
Three Tips for Implementing User-Centered Design Principles
Want even more information about best practices for implementing user-centered design principles? Here are Lindsay Derby's top three tips.
Use existing mental models.
“Lean on existing mental models.”
As designers, it can be tempting to create new and innovative solutions for every design problem. However, a key goal of user-centered design is to reduce unnecessary mental effort for the users. If there is an existing flow that works and is widely familiar, there should be a very compelling reason, backed by research, to change it.
Think long and hard before you decide to move the close button to the bottom corner of the screen.
Seek feedback early and often.
Derby highlights the critical role of feedback in the design process. “Seek feedback early and often,” she suggests.
“It is much easier to change a design while it is still in the planning and prototyping phase than when it is being developed.” Acting early lets you address issues before they become costly or time-consuming problems.
Accept that you are not the user.
And finally, Derby stresses the importance of understanding that the design is for the user, not the designer.
“Accept that you are not the user,” she advises.
“It is ok to make assumptions based on your professional experience and skills, but do not assume that you know how the user will feel about the design or how they will use it. We can only understand with testing and continuous iteration.”
User-Centric Products Require User-Centric Designers
If I had to give one piece of advice to wrap up this article, it’d be “put the user at the center,” as the name suggests.
Focus on designing and functioning according to their needs. Don’t just shout, promote, or try to sell aggressively.
No. Be quiet. And listen. Listen on repeat until you understand.
Write down every idea, suggestion, and need, and do your best to give your customers exactly what they want. No more, no less.
And that’s the whole point of UCD. It seems initially daunting with many steps and substeps, but actually, it all boils down to putting the user in “the first plan,” so that later you become their first and only choice.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in June 2022 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
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