User-centered design (UCD)

User-centered design (UCD) is the design philosophy that provides guidelines within the software development cycle to always focus on the user's wants, needs, and limitations to create the best possible end product for the user. This philosophy does not prescribe which tools to use and can thus be applied to waterfall or agile developments methodologies.

Even though many organizations adjust the UCD scope and the naming of steps, the basic foundation of the UCD PROCESS is always the same: RESEARCH, CONCEPT, DESIGN, DEVELOP, and TEST. After each cycle, iterations are made based on the users' feedback, thus improving the final product.

• Research: Conduct in-depth research that includes competitor benchmarking, field studies, focus groups, contextual, and individual interviews, just to name a few of the research techniques available, and collect sufficient data and insight into the user’s needs to develop useful personas that will guide the rest of the UCD process.
• Concept: The data collected in the research phase will define the scope and requirements of the project, while the personas will guide the usability goals and user scenarios for the user testing that will be performed using paper prototypes. Challenges will quickly be highlighted by the user’s interaction with the prototype and solutions can be proposed to streamline the concept.
• Design: At the design stage of the UCD process, the concept will be pretty solid with user-testing to support the project requirements and direction. The technical and functional requirements can be fleshed out in more detail with task flows, user journeys, wireframes, and prototypes together with visual designs of what the concept will look like after implementation.
• Develop: The concept can be rock solid and the visual designs breathtakingly beautiful, but if the implementation does not focus on meeting the best practice guidelines and accessibility standards, the usability of the product will be highly affected.
• Test: After implementation, the final product is tested using focus groups, field studies, customer surveys, performance analysis, and so on, to highlight any usability issues to improve the product during the next cycle. The UCD process is an iterative cycle that measures and evaluates the initial scope and requirements, and ensures the product is on track and improved with each cycle.

UCD, also called user-driven development (UDD), incorporates lean startup principles with the methodologies of agile development. The focus of UDD is to make the user part of the development cycle and not treat the user as an external factor. With this approach, the UX strategy will also need to adjust to the development cycle, depending on which software development methodology is being used, when creating a product.