Design

Getting results from user-centred design

All Flow's design projects follow a user-centred design (UCD) approach. It's a well-established way of creating successful interactive products, based on principles from design, psychology and software engineering. UCD offers remarkable business benefits, including stronger sales and reduced risk.

UCD makes use of techniques like personas and scenarios, interaction design and information architecture and multidisciplinary team workshops. It relies on specialist forms of user research including ethnography and usability testing.

With UCD, Flow helps organisations to achieve two key objectives:

• Innovation: Understanding what your target users need, and coming up with new ideas for delivering it profitably.
• Optimisation: Making sure that your product is polished and proven, so you can be sure your customers will be able and willing to use it.

Flow's UCD process involves 5 stages

1. Research: Learning about the people who use or are going to use your product, and the context in which they'll use it. It can include ethnographic techniques such as shadowing, diary studies and interviews, as well as focus groups, benchmarking and online tracking (for web projects).

2. Concept: Examining the needs of your users and of your business, and coming up with innovative solutions to address those needs. During this stage, the visual design team work on concepts for brand interpretation. The visual and interaction ideas come together for concept testing sessions with target users.

3. Iterative design: Designing and usability-testing mock-ups of your product through a series of repeated cycles. There's interaction design, information architecture, visual design and content to be worked through in detail. The result of each cycle feeds into and refines the next, ensuring that the final user experience is simple and delightful.

4. Implementation: The development team often needs quick interaction solutions when they encounter unexpected technical constraints. There's also accessibility checks and testing to perform, and a final usability test of the working product.

5. Launch: The roll-out is managed to ensure users experience a smooth transition from any legacy product. Once the product is out, it's important to gather feedback and metrics. This can include further usability testing and ethnographic work, along with web analytics.

Flexible and agile

Flow can provide any of these individual services to support your team, or deliver a complete UCD project. We can advise you on the right techniques for your budget.

The description shown here is linear, but UCD works well with agile software development processes too. Both UCD and agile approaches advocate rapid iterative creation of prototypes and multi-disciplinary collaboration.

For projects that involve a visual design component, we work with our partner Splendid. They really understand UCD and have a great portfolio of design and brand work.

The user-centred design process helps teams to focus on the needs and abilities of their target users throughout the design and development lifecycle. There are five stages:

1. Research
2. Concept
3. Design
4. Build
5. Launch

Back to The UCD diagram.