Four things to think about for your User Centric Design
4 Roads Four - Four things to think about for your User Centric Design
User-centric design is a philosophy and a process. To follow this path, you must focus on creating products, designing services, or imagining experiences built around a deep understanding of your end user’s needs, preferences, and limitations. When you create with a user-centric design, your final product will be useful and usable, giving your users a positive experience that exceeds their expectations and basic requirements.
User-centric design matters because it makes products more likely to succeed. Here are 4 Roads four tips to help you achieve a better user-centric design for all you do:
1 - Understand your users
A genuinely user-centric design must begin with your users. You need to understand who your users are, what they need, and how they behave. Many businesses profile their users simply by looking at age, gender, and location. However, a user-centric approach requires more. You must deeply understand their motivations, pain points, and how they interact with products or services similar to your own.
Creating detailed personas will tell you a story about your typical user, helping you to create a service designed for the person. To gather this information, you can:
Take surveys and questionnaires. These will help you gather data from a large cohort of people, uncovering user needs, preferences, and pain points.
Interviews. These are more personal ways of gathering the information you require. Interviews will be in small groups or, ideally, one-on-one. In this format, you will uncover insights that you might have missed through larger surveys.
Testing. Putting users in front of your product and seeing how they interact with it provides invaluable insight into users’ struggles and where improvements can be made.
Community. The best way to understand your users is through your own online community. If you still need to build your own platform, you can draw on data and knowledge from your user interactions on the social channels where your users interact with you and each other.
2 - Prioritise Usability
Usability and accessibility are fundamental to a design process that is easy to use and inclusive for all users, regardless of their abilities. You should ensure that your products and services are intuitive, efficient and accessible to the broadest possible audience. Some of the best ways to do this are:
Maintain a clear information architecture to simplify navigation. Content should be organised logically and hierarchically. By prioritising the most important sections to be easily accessible and using card sorting techniques to understand how users naturally categorise information, you can design a structure that appeals to and works for your users.
Alongside this, you should take a minimalist approach to design and avoid cluttering the interface with too many options that can overwhelm a user. Predictable patterns can also help navigation, with users accustomed to the same patterns across all sites they might use.
3 - Setup for consistency
Consistency in your design helps a user to build mental models of how an interface will work. If that suddenly changes from area to area or page to page, this will become a poor experience. Areas 4-Roads recommend you focus on are:
Visual consistency. Use a consistent visual language across all elements of the interface. Your colour schemes, typography, button styles, icons, and spacing are all important to ensuring that a website is user-friendly. Deviations can feel jarring and deter an individual from staying on a site.
Functional Consistency. Similar functions on pages and in the app should be the same everywhere. So, if a user clicks a button that opens a modal in a section, this same interaction should open a modal elsewhere. Users will develop an expectation from the first interaction they have, and it is important to continue to mirror that expectation.
Content. Your tone of voice should remain consistent throughout the user’s journey. This can be difficult with multiple people working on different areas of a product, but ensure guidelines are followed. If you label something as ‘favourites’, don’t refer to it as ‘saved’ in another area. Consistent language will ensure clarity among your users.
4 - Feedback
When most people hear the word feedback, they think about what the user will tell me about their experience. When 4-Roads talks about feedback for user-centric design, it is to ensure that your user has a sense of control and confidence in what they are doing.
Immediate Response. A user’s actions should have an immediate response. This can be as simple as a visual change to indicate a button has been pressed or an animation or notification. This feedback reassures a user that the system is responding to their input.
Error Messages. Things go wrong. Avoid generic statements like ‘something went wrong’. Tell your users what went wrong and how to fix it. ‘Your email address is missing’ is more helpful than ‘you missed a section’.
4-Roads Final Thoughts
User-centric design is a holistic approach to creating products. You have to prioritise the experience, needs, and preferences of your end users. The best way to do this is to involve your users throughout the design process and continuously iterate based on feedback.
User-centric design fosters satisfaction and loyalty. A positive experience is typically shared, and investing in your users sets you apart from the competition. It can also be a great tool to generate organic growth from your existing customer base.
Ready to Elevate Your User-Centric Design?
At 4 Roads, we specialise in creating seamless, user-friendly experiences that prioritize your customers’ needs. Whether you’re refining an existing design or starting from scratch, our expert team is here to help. Get in touch today and let’s create a design that keeps your users coming back!