What is User-Centered Design?什么是以用户为中心的设计？
User-centered design (UCD) is a method for designing ease of use into the total user experience with products. Key to this approach is the focus on understanding the users—their environment, their goals and tasks necessary to achieve these goals, their skills, and their abilities. Throughout the development cycle, feedback and input from users is gathered to ensure that the design is based on real data, and not the product development team’s imagination about what users do. This method enables the efficient design of effective interactive systems as UCD expedites and simplifies gathering user feedback and incorporates it into the design process.
Specifically, user-centered design means that product teams start by observing and working with its users. Throughout the design process, users judge whether the product meets their requirements by evaluating prototypes. After a period of iterative evaluation and design, the technology is built to fit the mockups.
User-centered design is about describing the whole user experience, not just what the users see on the page. It is about relating user goals to application functions, as opposed to taking requirements from someone and turning out web pages. The deliverable for user-centered design is a product that is useful, usable, and desirable to users, not just the final HTML, programming, or implementation.
Note that user-centered design is different from and complementary to market research. Market research strives to answer the question, “What product should be built?” Marketing knows what customers are asking for, what drives their behavior at the point of sale, what they will pay for, and what determines their purchasing habits. User Experience, on the other hand, knows what customers actually do, what makes a product simple or difficult, usable or not. Thus, User Experience is better suited to answer the question, “How should the product be designed?”
Marketing, User Experience, and Engineering offer a spectrum of perspectives in product development. Creating the right synergy between these functions so that a successful product is built is not an easy task. The section on “Implementing User-Centered Design” on p. 8 discusses not only how to build a User Experience team but also how to incorporate this triad of groups successfully into a product development team.

 

 

Implementing User-Centered Design用户为中心的设计的实施
Effective interface design is more than just following guidelines and applying rules. To create products that are truly useful and usable, one must follow a user-centered attitude and design methodology. The right combination of diverse skills, team structure, and development process are essential to implementing user-centered design.
The Team
It is important to have a well-balanced team that has the skills needed to implement a user-centered design approach to product development, often referred to as User Experience (UE). Rarely are all these skills found in one person, so create a team of individuals who specialize in these areas who can contribute uniquely to the final product. The following sections describe the various disciplines in UE and how they should be integrated into the team structure and product development process.
User Experience Disciplines
Interaction/Product Designers create a cohesive conceptual model for the product that is consistent and easy to learn and understand. They build a solution that supports the overall work flow, not just isolated actions. Interaction design must take into account the task requirements and context of use with users’ skills, knowledge, and capabilities. Interaction designers typically have backgrounds in human-computer interaction, human factors, graphic design, industrial design, or equivalent.
Visual Designers are trained in graphic design and possess the design skills that merge the conceptual model and interaction design with the aesthetics of the product. They are the experts at layout, typography, color, and illustration. They design the product pages with the goal of making the site easy to consume visually, aesthetically pleasing to look at, and visually consistent with the rest of the network.
User Researchers (Usability Engineers) gather qualitative data about what users are doing. The characteristic attributes of this research are that it is qualitative (as opposed to the quantitative data gathered from data mining and surveys), emphasize behavioral observation (as opposed to asking users what they do), and center on understanding users’ intent (as opposed to only looking at what happened).
Web Developers/Rapid Prototypers can rapidly build product mock-ups and interfaces that can be tested immediately, before the real technology is implemented. Skills for this role typically come from computer science or engineering.

Product Design Life Cycle产品涉及的生命周期
As important as it is to have people with the right skills and appropriate team structure to implement user-centered design, it is just as important to facilitate a good design process. An effective design process involves several phases: researching, designing, prototyping, testing, and iterating.

Research
Designing for users presupposes that the product development team understands the users it is targeting. True understanding comes from extensive qualitative and quantitative research, which help the team identify market segments and user needs, behaviors, and attitudes.
Design
A fundamental premise of bringing design into the development process is that design happens before programming begins. If the foundation is flawed, corrections can be difficult to make after coding begins. During the design phase, objectives and features are not only defined, but also who the target user is, what their goals are, what the context of use is, and what the task requirements are. As mentioned earlier, design tradeoffs are made based on the business case for the product, so it is important to establish the business goals upfront. During this phase it is important that the team consider the product in terms of goals, which are generally more descriptive than features.
Prototype
As the product evolves from a conceptual framework and interaction model, it is important to create prototypes of the design. Prototypes not only help communicate the design, but also help the team visualize the design and understand task flow. They are also useful for gathering user feedback throughout the design process, whether they are storyboards or interactive mockups.
Low-fidelity prototypes may be created using pencil and paper. Such prototypes are useful for visualizing and getting user feedback on task organization or conceptual ideas. Hi-fidelity prototypes are more operational and allow the team to get feedback on the mechanics of user interaction.
Test
User testing during the design process offers many benefits. Feedback from user testing can provide input into the current design, future releases, and related products, and offer general lessons about usability that might be applicable across the entire network. It can also provide the development team insight into the user’s perceptions, satisfaction, questions, problems, and general use. More specific information about user research methods can be found in the next section.
Iterate
Rarely is a product team going to nail down the best solution on the first try. Therefore, it is important to allow for time to iterate on the design so the team has an opportunity to modify the design based on user feedback. The more the design can be refined upfront before coding, the more time spent on development can be saved. Of course, additional lead time is needed for the design team to design, prototype, test, and iterate, so involving UED upfront and early is imperative to fostering user-centered design.