Description of UCD life cycle stages and phases

Product Development Planning – Requirements Planning Phase

The UCD Phases for this stage are:

• Build a User Profile
• Setting Usability Goals

Building a User Profile – Task Analysis

Purpose

First and foremost, you must know whom you are designing for. One of the very first steps in creating a usable product is to create user profiles for each unique group of users that will be working with the application. The goal of this step is to learn about any characteristics that could influence how the users interact with the product.

• Users’ goals and needs become a common point of focus for the development team.
• They help avoid the trap of building what users ask for rather than what they will actually use.
• Designs can be constantly evaluated against the user profiles.

It is also important to consider if any of the user groups will have dominant needs that will influence development more than the other groups.

• How many unique user groups will be interacting with the product?
  • Novice / infrequent application (e.g., web, Windows) users
  • Expert / frequent application users
  • Novice / infrequent data users
  • Expert / frequent data users
  • Administrators

The more familiar you are with your target audience and their underlying characteristics and motivations, the easier it will be to design and develop applications that will meet their needs.

• How do they go about learning new tasks?
• Are they motivated to change their work behaviour?
• Are there physical characteristics that will influence your design?
• Is there prior application knowledge that will help (or hinder) using your system?

Benefits

Product usability is achieved or improved by the first understanding users’ needs (i.e. their actual goals, the challenges and limitations they face, the unique or unexpected ways in which they use the product, etc). These needs are determined by collecting data on actual representative users’ interactions with products.
Method / Process Inputs

To build a User Profile, you must first determine who will use the planned product. This is achieved by generating information based on four main areas of user characteristics:

• Psychological Characteristics
  • This will cover finding out the attitude and motivation of the user. These characteristics can show us the reason why users do and function the way they do in their work environment. Their attitude and motivation toward their job will affect the way they do processes.
• User Knowledge and Experience
  • Knowing the level of experience and knowledge of things like: typing skills and task experience etc. Will aid in the complexity of the application currently used or to be built. This information is vitally important in understanding user experience, as it will play a key role in developing the users’ profile.
• Job and Task Analysis
  • Task structure – What types of work did they use the product for?
  • Frequency of use – Are they novice (short periods of use) or expert (frequent use).
• Physical Characteristics
  • This covers any physical limitations that users have e.g. Colour blindness, visual disabilities etc.

Process Outputs

• The information gathered on user characteristics will be used to update URS to reflect user knowledge, user experience, job types and task characteristics which sums up the User Profile. Section 5 of the URS – User Characteristics.
• Scenarios can also be built up using this information for the User profile.
  • Scenarios are most useful when produced early in the development as specific realistic and detailed examples of what a user would do, but without making any reference to what interface features that would be used. Scenarios can also be used later to explore how the interface would be operated.

Setting Usability Goals

Purpose

To establish usability goals which can be tested later in the development process to determine if the implementation of the requirements have met these goals.

Benefits

• Highlights the importance of usability early in development
• Provides concrete objectives for usability
• Provides usability criteria that can be tested.

Method / Process Inputs

Establish requirements for effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction for the user groups and tasks identified in the context of use analysis and in the scenarios.

• Current System Analysis
  • If there is an existing system, the usability practitioner with the help of an expert user would set a list of usability goals to be used as a minimum standard which would be used to refine the usability requirements. The minimum acceptable usability would normally be equal to the current usability level, and the target usability could be derived as an improvement that is a higher level to the current system.
• Note: If a current system is not a viable option then usability goals may be based on the Project User Requirements and the User Profile.

Usability Goals Examples

• The design must support users working in a high-interrupt environment, with lots of context information on screen to remind users where they are when they get distracted.
• The design must support very infrequent users of a very complex task. Thus, it must be self-explanatory and easy to learn and remember, incorporating as many business rules as possible and leading users by the hand through the task so they need not remember details of proper procedure between users.

I will continue to follow-up with the Design stage next week.