Menace

Saturday, 8th March 2008, 2 Comments »

User centered development approach

This is very much a sounding board post of a very loose concept that I need to get out of my brain so your ideas, definitions, feedback, etc are very much wanted.

For a while now I’ve been thinking about how to ensure that any given web project stays focused on the user throughout the entire project, both from a client and vendor perspective. As far as I’m aware, there isn’t really a software development process that spells out “Oi! go test on your users” at every step (I’ll get to UCD in a minute). We also have ideas, concepts and vocabularies in our ’specialties’ where terms are often misunderstood, for example I’ve found that developers co-opt the term ‘design’ to mean ‘data design’ or ‘architectural design of hardware’, etc.

What’s wrong with current approaches

Almost every diagram I’ve seen about UCD does two things, explain in detail the ‘user experience’ steps in great detail and then have a bullet point called ‘build/implement’, which to me seems to me is as silly as developers disregarding design because they don’t understand it/care. Perhaps, because I’ve spent a long time relating to both, but I’m of the opinion that the very nature of the medium these two ’specialties’ bleed together and we need to relate.

I’m not particularly interested in starting a religious war over Aglie, Waterfall, etc or Prince2 vs. PMI. I’m far more interested in creating a ’shared’ vocabulary, with common deliverables of a quality standard.

So the approach

I’ve very purposely tired to keep the phases and steps at a high level, particularly so it could be adaptable to constraints (budget, time, etc), project type, be flexible to professional preferences (personas, scenarios, etc), and the reason content, graphic design and technically focussed steps or requirements are completely ignored. When it says ‘report’, it could mean a collated report of all the previous steps in a phase, really it’s a prompt to report back to the client about progress, findings, changes, etc.

Anyway,

1. “Research Sessions”
   This is kinda two fold, one is discovering who the users are (demographics, usage, etc). The second is about the business needs, cant’s and desires (content types, higher sales, etc). Both the UX team and Developers should be involved with the business needs discussion.
2. “Functional requirements”
   So Interaction design is about page flow, the over all architecture and scenerios (business rules, etc). Interface design is effectively the deliverable of a functional spec, the output could be like axure or Zef’s Template Specifications. However, signed off shouldn’t just come from the business/SME, but the developers as well.
3. “Prototype tests”
   This is a chance for the SME, UX team and potentially users to test, see how it all hangs together, etc. I would imagine that it would be a benefit if there was an existing iterative and incremental development process.
4. “Final run-though”
   Could be anything from a highly formalized testing regime with UAT, to an SME and the UX team having one final click around.
5. “Launch & Measure”

What approach would you take to create a project that would always focus on the user?