There’s no “I” in “User”

I have been thinking…and that’s never a good thing! As Usability Professionals we must be careful of the “I”. When asked by a developer, “What do you think?” we need to be careful the first words out of our mouths aren’t “I”. It’s so easy to say what we think and then backing it up with stats is not best practise. We aren’t about the “I” we about the “Users”. Ever heard some one say “Well, they say…”, who the hell is they?! I think sometimes we tend to use the “I” and the “They” as cop outs to get a point across quickly rather then pointing to facts, which is what usability professionals deal with day to day.

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?