What is User Centred Design? And How Sharp Businesses Stand to Gain From It

In product design – be it bespoke software, an app, website, or physical hardware – user experience sits at the top of the pyramid of audience needs. Or, in my mind, it’s like that solitary Jenga piece at the bottom row holding the whole tower up – because even if your product is aesthetically appealing, if it’s not smooth and intuitive to use, you’re missing out on customers. Enter user-centred design.

This design philosophy is all about placing the user at the heart of your process, allowing your audience to lead, so you best satisfy their needs. It’s a framework that puts greater emphasis on investigation and collaboration, and grounds your decision-making on tangible data right from your customers’ mouths, rather than leaning entirely on assumptions.

In my experience, businesses rarely consult so heavily with their users. But, as consumers continue to crave hyper-personalised experiences, this level of rigour is a powerful differentiator in today’s chock-a-block marketplace. Keep reading to find out why UCD is so effective and what a user-centric design process actually looks like.

Skip to:

• What is User-Centred Design?
• Why It’s So Valuable to Developers
• The Core Principles of UCD
• How the Process Works
• Drawbacks (or Misconceptions?) of User-Centred Design
• Conclusion

What is User-Centred Design?

Born out of cognitive science principles in the 1970s, user-centred design is a design philosophy and approach that foregrounds the needs of the user throughout the process.

Leaving aside secondary issues like aesthetics and flashy features, it instead focuses on collecting real-world data from actual users to guide each phase of product design and development.

As a result, it leans heavily on different research techniques and iteration – concepts and features being tested and reworked until you have an end-product that is enjoyable, accessible, intuitive, and emotionally resonant to use.

The reason it’s so highly regarded in the UX/UI community is that it staves off any biases we might bring to the project, which could inadvertently steer decisions away from what’s best for the stakeholders. This allows us to granularly tailor experiences to real audiences, rather than relying solely on opinions or assumptions based on industry standards.

Why It’s So Valuable to Developers

Ask any web developer or product designer what their number one priority is for any given project. Invariably, the answer will be usability.

This is because UX/UI success is measured by how naturally, deeply, people engage with the product, not how aesthetic it is. By tapping into a specific audience’s desires, innate and more explicit, designers can craft organic, frictionless experiences that feel good to them.

User-centred design recognises that impactful design, at every scale, is about harnessing real-world data from the user to create this sort of emotional resonance, all the while instilling solid functionality and accessibility across interfaces.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg…

Tangible Benefits of User-Centred Design

• Closer user involvement = a higher likelihood of meeting your core user base’s expectations and needs, which naturally reduces the bad metrics (customer churn, bounce rates, etc.) and increases the good ones (satisfaction scores, customer lifetime value, sales, traffic, ROI, and so on).
• Tailoring to particular use cases shrinks the margin for human error, making for more robust, less buggy products.
• Bad UX costs a pretty penny, especially at high-intent stages of the customer journey. For example, abandoned carts account for billions of $ in lost revenue, with rates sitting at 70% globally. With UCD, though, you can catch mistakes early.
• Close user involvement and the collaborative spirit it fosters engenders more empathetic designers. As a byproduct, they’ll be more switched on to ethical issues like privacy and accessibility needs.
• It’s a powerful differentiator in overcrowded markets, driving loyalty and higher conversion rates.
• UCD prevents feature bloat and misconceptions about stakeholder needs, which comes particularly in handy when developing complex/new products like enterprise software.
• It grounds you in tangible data, helping teams and stakeholders to align on a shared direction. Developers/designers will have research to back up every decision; for instance, a test demonstrating a 25% uptake in form completion when back buttons are removed from onboarding flows.

The Core Principles of UCD

Okay, so user-centric design is a more iterative, collaborative approach to crafting user experiences. It side-steps the assumption that there is ‘an average user’, recognising the immense value in tailoring designs for target audiences.

By building interfaces specifically for the people who will be using them, your guiding purpose becomes much clearer and every decision more intentional.

Let’s take a quick look at the underlying principles that make all of this possible.

• Find the overlap between user needs and business goals, with the former as your primary focus
• Involve users throughout design and development to gather vital feedback and data points
• Progress is driven and refined by user-centred evaluation (not assumptions)
• The process is iterative – AKA a cycle of testing and tweaking
• Design should address the entire user experience
• Teams include and seek out multidisciplinary skills and numerous perspectives
• Accessibility and inclusivity are key

How the Process Works

Granted, not every business will take the exact same route to a user-centric product. But they share many similarities.

Below is the general framework we apply to UCD-informed UX development. (Psst, if you want to see the end result of the graft, do go and have a nosey at our portfolio.) Typically, it looks like a series of phases: planning, research, alignment, design, testing and then iteration.

Planning

It might sound counterintuitive, given everything I’ve said about biases, but I tend to springboard my initial ideas for a project from assumptions – namely, who the users are and their typical behaviour.

I’ll consider previous website builds I’ve completed, with similarities in audience, niche and industry to compare and contrast on the baseline decisions. This way, we can validate ideas early and cross off features that don’t serve users, preventing us from building unnecessary elements and wasting time.

In these early days, we’ll also meet with stakeholders to discuss the full requirements and put forward preliminary plans.

Research

Next comes the research phase. Here, it’s important to slow down and gather as much information as possible to stay laser-focused on real-world user needs.

Get to Know Users

Before you can design for a particular audience, you need to know what makes them tick. What, when and how they’ll use the product, and what they value most in the design. The best way forward is via a mix of methods:

• Surveys to glean qualitative insights into behaviour, preferences and obstacles they might face
• Interviews, often, one-to-one conversations to gain deeper insights
• Focus groups for those all-important discussions, which surface patterns of behaviour and common frustrations
• Observations on how users behave IRL, using tools like heatmaps and session replays

Create Personas

With the above information, you can build detailed personas. These are archetypes representing a particular user to help guide product features, navigation, element hierarchy and many other decisions. Alongside expectations, desires, behaviour and environment, you might want to add fictional details to flesh out the persona, so it’s a little more lifelike.

Example persona for a healthcare portal:

30-year-old busy mum of two, Eloise, works part-time and wants her customer data – health plans and payment details – to be fully accessible but simple and not bogged down in clutter. Her biggest gripe? Portals that can only be accessed on desktop, and not on the go.

Alignment

Before I hop onto wireframes, I always take a moment to reshift my focus back to what the client needs to achieve. The sweet spot between their objectives and the users’ needs is where success happens.

To achieve it, you have to turn all of the research you’ve accrued into measurable, testable requirements. And here’s the kicker: they need to be super specific, otherwise you might drift off course.

Case in point: when Walmart asked customers whether they’d like their stores to be ‘less cluttered’, they failed to qualify how and why. And the cardinal sin, they didn’t bother to gather detailed information. What seems like a small UX blunder ended up costing them a $1.85 billion loss when they redesigned stores to hold 15% less inventory!

 Design

This is where everything starts to come together. I’ll start building out user flows and wireframes, and then get to work on interactive prototypes. At Vital, we always work from a foundation of clarity, user-friendliness and measurability.

Testing

With the design coming together, it’s time for testing to get underway. Here, we’ll conduct a user experience audit to…

• Validate benchmarks we set earlier
• Evaluate accessibility and inclusivity
• Catch mistakes and gaps in the design
• Perform usability testing, ensuring user journeys are smooth, intuitive and fast
• Collect user feedback

Iteration

Development doesn’t end when you’ve handed over the files or even when the product launches, for that matter; the process is one of continual learning and refinement. That means carefully listening to what users say, well after the site, app or software has gone live.

In fact, it’s often where the most valuable tweaks stem from, as it tends to be when folks are most vocal about performance. Make sure you have a robust ticketing system, so you can address issues promptly and prioritise fixes properly.

Drawbacks (or Misconceptions?) of User-Centred Design

Lastly, I want to draw your attention to a topic of discourse I’ve seen crop up in a few places online, namely threads and forums. Are there any drawbacks to user-centred design? And if so, how come?

It’s a Slow Burn Process

The glaringly obvious downside is that, yes, it takes time. Whittling down broader assumptions into research-informed decisions, setting the scope of the project to balance both user and business objectives, designing prototypes and testing them against real feedback, not to mention all of the tweaking – it’s laborious work that can’t be rushed.

But that doesn’t invalidate this vital process. Get your timeframes in order, and with a pinch of patience, you can deliver a final product that effectively meets real-world needs alongside the technical requirements.

Many a time, I’ve seen eager businesses cut corners, pushing out flashy website features that they think look cool, but fall flat in the eyes of their customers. For me, completely neglecting audience input risks losing consistency across the user journey, and this is where you’ll quickly see conversions drop off.

It Creates a Mental Box for Designers

If you do a bit of internet sleuthing, you’ll quickly discover that there’s a UCD myth out there. One that blames a ‘dictatorship’ of user feedback on bland builds and a lack of disruptive innovation. But I don’t buy it.

Placing your target audience at the forefront shouldn’t forestall creativity. Well, not if you’re doing it right. And it certainly doesn’t mean that you’re bound to every single survey response or comment (especially if you fail to show them any design possibilities).

It’s my understanding that user-centred design goes wrong when:

• You fudge the data
• Your user targeting is off
• You misread the problem
• You opted for the wrong solution
• Or there’s a fault further down the pipeline, such as a wishy washy brand narrative or just plain ol’ bad execution. Truly, there’s a hundred other reasons you may have undershot your goals outside of design.

Conclusion: If You Want a User-Centric Product, You Need User-Centric Designers

The future of UI/UX design is invisible, every element so effortlessly intuitive it’s like they’re not even there. In this way, user-centred design is akin to reading your specific user base’s mind.

And if the shift towards more human, resonant experiences continues full throttle, developers and designers will necessarily have to admit that UCD isn’t a nice “extra”, but a fundamental to creating endurable products that leave a mark on their users.

Through years of experience – good and bad – I’ve learnt that the closest alignment between audiences’ preferences, expectations, behaviours and requirements = serious cost-savings and faff reduction later down the line.

So, while you’re here, why not consult with our web gurus to see how we can build you a results-oriented website built precisely for your customers?

Frequently Asked Questions