User-Centered Design

Abstract

As technology and services advance and become more deeply integrated in the daily live of their customers and therefore human lives, the different development processes and projects need to ensure that the offered solutions become more intuitive and user-friendly in order to secure customer satisfaction and stable sales. While taking a closer look on classical development models e.g. Waterfall model, it is clear that during the different project stages the focus of the project managers are only project related and mostly not viewed from an end customer perspective, which can cause usage and understanding problems.

The User-Centered Design Approach takes these problems into consideration. The goal is to design understandable and enjoyable solutions for the end customers, while either taking their personal opinions into account or lead the project from an end customer optimized view. Therefore the different processes must be lead towards a user's needs, abilities and expectations in order to guarantee a maximized customer focus. The UCD process consists of five steps, of which the last 4 are following a interative logic. Furthermore, the UCD is defined in the DIN EN ISO 9241-210 "Human-centred design for interactive systems " standard.