Top 10 checklist for user-centred design

I recently presented to the ACT chapter of Australian Business Analysts Association (ABAA) on user-centred design. It was a timely reminder for some that people, their needs and wants, are an important part of the system design and requirements gathering — just as important as the requirements of business owners and the strategic goals of the project.

My latest IA engagement was no exception. It was good to be able to show to many of the analysts on the project, who had never seen user-centred design before, what good information architecture can do for a project. They saw first hand that user-centred design, particularly as the centre of requirements gathering activities, and done early, often, and up-front (not squashed between analysis and system implementation) can address many of the typical change management problems associated with introducing a new system. The project sponsor gave me a telling look one afternoon and said “we should have been doing this from the start, shouldn’t we”.

Here’s my Top 10 check-list to increase a system’s usability and the satisfaction levels of its users.

1. Know your users: Take time to understand the people who are going to use the system, whether its a website or application.

2. Content is King: Design features and content specifically for your users, not for yourself.
3. Make it logical: The organisation of information and how the navigation works has to be logical to those who will use it.

4. Be consistent: Don’t make people constantly adapt to changes layout, language and navigation paradigms — it makes learning about and using the system very confusing.

5. Make it simple: Using systems should require as little mental effort as possible — there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to get the job done and having to work hard to remember how a system works at the same time.

6. Plain English please!: Do the terms and language used in the system make sense to the people who will use it? Don’t make them learn a whole new vocabulary with words that mean one thing to them but another thing when used in the system. Avoid legalese, bureaucratese and organisational jargon.

7. Make the information scanable: Information should be laid out on the screen so that it has a logical flow for the eye. Don’t make people have to remember that one piece of important information is here, while another piece is somewhere else. Similar pieces of information should be as closely associated as possible.

8. Navigation redundancy: People all think about information in different ways, mostly through association rather than categorisation. This means that you need to provide multiple ways of discovering information — and this doesn’t just mean browse and search. If you use a taxonomy, make sure information can go in multiple categories, and complement it with a folksonomy.

9. Design by convention: People have an expectation of how systems and their components will work based on previous experience of other systems. This means you need to make your design comply with those design expectations — banners, navigation, search, login, and even cart features all need to appear according to existing design conventions. This doesn’t mean you can’t innovate — just know what your users expect and make it easy for them to learn your system.

10. Make the design clear: This will help people avoid making mistakes when they use your system. Help them recover from errors through providing consistent messaging in the interface itself.

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Prototyping tools — storyboarding

Movie-makers use storyboarding to plan their films, even if, like in Finding Nemo, they already have a complete script. For Pixar, storyboarding meant they could uncover inconsistencies in plot, flaws in the storyline, unnecessary deviations from the main story, and where there was room to make jokes even funnier.

Today, IAs and BAs use storyboarding to interact with users so as to full articulate the story of the way they work in the way they want to work and interact with the systems they’re building through a process is called user-centred design.

In typical systems development cycles, users are not involved in articulating the ‘how’ of the system. Often, they’re not even invovled until the end where user-acceptance-testing reveals problems that will only require expensive re-development. A user-centred design processes, though, like storyboarding, seeks to involve users from the very beginning of the project, and at each stage of development, to ensure that the all difficult concepts, systems logic, navigation, issues with usability and terminology, as well as interactions, are worked through. This ensures that the end product, as with the movie-markers and their films, is something that people will want to engage with.

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User-centred design and prototyping

Last night I presented to the Australian Business Analysis Association (ABAA) on a topic that is close to my heart — user-centred design and prototyping.

As business analysts, we’re often focussed on eliciting business requirements for systems, managing the relationships between the business owners and the vendors and developers of the technology. Unfortunately, we sometimes forget that what we’re doing is delivering a system that is for users. This results in us delivering the ‘what’ in terms of requirements, but forgetting that there’s a very strong need to find out from the people who will use systems the ‘how’ it will work for them. If you’ve worked with an Information Architect before, this is exactly the head-space that drives their activities to determine navigation paradigms that are truly usable and accessible and systems that are designed to meet people’s needs in an intuitive way, rather than systems by developers that you have to ‘learn’ how to use.

User-centred design seeks to change all that by putting the user as the focus of all project activities, from scoping, to analysis and requirements gathering, all the way through design and delivery.

Starting with prototying in the scoping and planning phase is a great way to swing things back to the a focus on users — storyboarding and interactive prototypes are two of my favourite tools to achieve this goal.

If movie-makers like Pixar and Peter Jackson can use these tools to make movies that people will go to see and enjoy, then BAs can also make use of them to design systems that people will want to use.

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