UCD Overview

I have been working on the UCD process to fit into the development lifecycle used at a major software company I was working for that were not involving any type of usability testing into their development stages. (Shock Horror!)

Over the next few weeks I’m going to refine it and out it up here for anyone who want s to comment or cut and paste it to use in your own company or development lifecycle.

here is the first installment - A UCD Overview.

Purpose

The purpose of this process is to provide a basis for Project Managers to integrate Usability engineering to a particular project, and to also provide guidance in the planning of the associated sequencing of stages, phases, iterations and activities.
Scope

The UCD described in here can be applied to any software development project, however the content is targeted towards providing guidance to Project Managers who are planning and managing software development projects.

UCD overview

This process model emphasizes that one should not rush straight into design. The least expensive way for usability activities to influence a product is to do as much in the early stages of the design, since it will then not be necessary to change the design to comply with the usability recommendations and may make it possible to avoid developing unnecessary features.

The UCD model consists of:

Product Development Planning Stage – Requirements Planning Stage

• Building a User Profile (Task analysis) – Building User Profile is the first task in the Usability Engineering Lifecycle. It is important to separate and identify each user in there own category (eg. Managers, Data entry, Warehouse worker etc). This information can be supplied from the Product manager. Once each user category has been identified we then can obtain the user characteristics of each user group :

1. Psychological Characteristics

• This will cover finding out the attitude and motivation of the user.

2. User Knowledge and Experience

• Knowing the level of experience and knowledge of things like: typing skills and task experience etc.

3. Job and Task Analysis

• Task structure and frequency of use.

4. Physical Characteristics

• This covers any physical limitations that users have e.g. colour blindness, visual disabilities.

• Setting Usability Goals – Setting a minimum level which would be acceptable

The minimum acceptable usability would normally be equal to the current usability level, and the target usability could be derived as an improved level to the current system.

Design Stage
Maintaining General Design Principles
Style / Design Guides

• The Style Guide is meant to provide design guidance and “look and feel” standards that will be applied across all products developed within Mincom.

Prototype Design Evaluation

• Building and testing prototypes are vitally important to the usability engineering process to obtain rapid feedback on structure of screens and navigation etc.

Implementation Stage
Usability Testing and Analysis
Final product Usability analysis. This should be mandatory prior to any release to the customer.

• User Feedback and Follow up Studies

• Interviews – Can be conducted by a usability consultant or marketing. Users are asked a series of questions relating to their experience with the system.

• Questionnaires – Similar outcome to the interview method.

• User Feedback – Documented feedback that can be feed back into support or future product development.

Below is a diagram of the UCD process and it’s stages in the development lifecycle.