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UCD Process
SAP UCD
- SAP User-Centered Design (introduction)
- User-Centered Design (overview article)
- SAP User Experience Glossary
Usability Activities
See also...
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SAP User-Centered Design (introduction) |
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User-Centered Design Success Story: SAP Analytics Customer Validation Project |
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The Art and Science of Usability |
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SAP User Experience Glossary |
User-Centered Design
By Ulrike Weissenberger and Carola Fellenz Thompson, SAP User Experience, SAP AG – October 7, 2009
Getting It Right the First Time...
User-Centered Design (UCD) is a flexible process for software development projects that enables teams to more effectively meet the needs of users and customers.
The UCD process defines a series of collaborative activities that involves the entire product team, ideally including:
- Developers
- Solution managers
- Interaction designers
- User researchers
- Other key stakeholders
These collaborative activities take place in five distinct phases: Plan, Research, Design, Adapt, and Measure.
Keep in mind that the UCD process is flexible. If no interaction designer or user researcher can be assigned to a project, then the UCD activities can also be performed by solution managers and developers with the appropriate training. If some steps in the UCD process are not feasible, they can be left out. Clearly, the closer a development team sticks to the entire process, the better the results will be. But in the end, any UCD activity is better than none! Sometimes even small design activities can bring big rewards.
Plan – Planning is critical to the success of all projects, and this is also true of projects using UCD. In the Plan phase, the team determines all of the UCD activities and ensures that the necessary resources are available. Read more…
Research – Before you can design a product, it is imperative that you have a clear understanding of the users' goals and tasks, the market needs, and related work. Read more…
Design – In the Design phase, you define your system from the users' perspective. Initially, this phase takes the form of use cases and an object action model, which describes the tasks that the system will support. From these tasks you create UI designs, beginning with rough sketches and ending with detailed UI design specifications. Read more…
Adapt – The Adapt phase acknowledges that even the best conceived designs often need to be adapted when Development begins coding. This adaptation can occur as a result of unforeseen limitations in the target technology, new requirements, or missing functionality in the initial design. Read more…
Measure – When the product is released, it is possible to measure its usability quantitatively. These tests measure a product's effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. Test scores are combined to provide a single number, which is the Usability Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Read more…
Besides the five process phases UCD consists of four fundamental principles:
- Focus on real end-users
- Validate requirements
- Design, prototype, and develop products iteratively
- Understand and design for a holistic user experience
Focus on real end-users – End-users who use the product at the end should be engaged early and continuously throughout the development lifecycle. Not just "proxies" who buy the product or manage those who use it. Proxies typically do not understand end-users' daily needs and pain points deeply enough to represent them. Understanding end-users mean to understand their goals, tasks and activities, characteristics (e. g. backgrounds, skill levels, and responsibilities), use of other software and artifacts needed to perform their jobs, organizational and social contexts, workflows within these contexts.
Validate requirements – End-users' feedback and performance on tasks and activities should be observed, measured and recorded throughout the product design and development lifecycle. Validation of end-user profiles ensure that the design is for the right end-users. Validation of end-user requirements ensure to build what end-users really need. Identification of usability issues on low- to medium-fidelity prototypes and running applications ensures that issues are fixed early, before the software is released.
Design, prototype, and develop products iteratively – the iterative approach throughout the whole design process ensures a continuously refinement of scope, quality and fidelity. Functionality and fidelity is incrementally built up in prototypes. Feedback from usability evaluations on prototypes and iterative UI designs is incorporated.
Understand and design for a holistic user experience – A holistic approach considers how people hear about the software, how they use it, how the pay for it, how they maintain it, how problems get fixed, how the software can be changed or personalized. This approach addresses different needs. From a customer perspective the software should be easy to install and integrate into the system landscape, easy to update and maintain, it should require only minimal training. The end user has a different view on what he is expecting from the software: it should support his work activities, provide a satisfying user experience, present the information clearly, and match how he thinks. All these aspects should be considered when talking about a holistic user experience.
Plan
Because of the collaborative nature of the User-Centered Design (UCD) process,
resources
are required from multiple teams. To ensure your chances of success, it is
important to plan the UCD activities for the entire project up front and to
ensure that the people and budget are available for all of your activities.
Specifically, you need to:
- Identify the key stakeholders including sponsors and the core team of collaborators—such as solution manager, development leads, interaction designer, and user researcher.
- Hold interviews with key stakeholders
- Identify UCD activities.
- Determine availability of the core team of collaborators.
- Determine travel budget to support UCD activities (for example, for team site visits or observing usability studies in remote lab locations).
- Determine budget for third-party support, such as user research vendors and participant recruiting.
- Work with stakeholders and project management to negotiate the resources and establish a plan.
Research
Research is the second step of the User-Centered Design (UCD) process. By understanding the needs of your users, you can uncover specific requirements for new versions, ideas for new products, and inspiration for innovation. Research projects provide opportunities for multi-disciplinary teams to gain an understanding of their users and to form a solid foundation for the Design step.
The main goals of the Research step are to:
- Create or update user profiles based on research findings.
- Identify, analyze, and understand goals, tasks, tools, pain points, and needs of the target users.
- Derive user requirements through data synthesis.
- Update the business process model based on research findings.
Activities that can be conducted to reach the goals are:
- Perform 360° analysis of existing applications. The objective is to learn more about existing offerings and identify potential opportunities for improvement. Market and industry trends should also be considered.
- Conduct field research to observe what users really do in their work environments.
- Run focus groups to find out what users really think of a product or how they would respond to a new product concept.
- Conduct interviews
- Conduct formative usability tests to evaluate designs from previous releases as input for development of the next release.
Design
Take everything you learned from the Research phase - user profiles, task flows and pain points, market analysis - and begin to structure it around the way the user thinks about the system.
To do this:
- Your team creates use cases and a user object model. Together these comprise the user's perspective or mental model of the system.
- The interaction designer begins to sketch potential UI design solutions. Early designs will likely be in the form of wireframes, with the designs increasing in fidelity as the concepts become clearer.
- Development and solution management reviews designs as they evolve.
- Validate the design proposals with users in the form of formative usability studies or cognitive walk-throughs.
Adapt
The User-Centered Design (UCD) process does not end with the hand off of the design to the development group. This fourth phase of the UCD process acknowledges that even the best conceived designs often need to be adapted when development begins coding. Adaptation can occur as a result of unforeseen limitations in the target technology, new requirements, or missing functionality in the initial design.
Specifically:
- The interaction designer and solution manager remain active members of the product team, which collaborates to address issues.
- The team holistically adapts the design to address issues as they arise.
- Adapted designs are validated with users.
Measure
You and your team have done your strategic planning, completed your research, designed the product, coded it, and released it. How do you assess your success?
Success can be measured by a combined score of the following measures:
- Effectiveness
- Efficiency
- Satisfaction
What is the Benefit of Adopting SAP's UCD Process?
SAP's UCD process is a structured approach to identify end users' needs, pain points, and requirements and bring these insights into the development process to design and develop software products that support end users' goals, tasks, and objectives while working with the system. The idea of having a highly collaborative approach by bringing together skills from various disciplines of software development (UX, SM, Dev) ensures that the different views and experiences are considered throughout the development lifecycle. The results at the end are products that are designed for a holistic user experience to meet customers' expectations as well as end users' expectations.
Conclusions
User-centered design is not just about the user interface and the screen layout, colors, and buttons. It is much more! To come to a good UI design at the end, it is essential to lay the foundation in the beginning. This foundation is an understanding of what end users really need and want – the user requirement. As already stated in the name of the process, "User-Centered" Design, the end-user should be involved in every step of software development process. This investment of involving end users and customers early in the development process ensures that software products are produced that are demanded and accepted by users at the end.
