User-centred design

User-centred design means involving users in the development and evolution of your tools, to take account of their needs, desires and limitations whilst you make it. You may think a new feature is brilliant, but they may disagree, or simply be unable to use it for some reason. Allowing your thinking and design work to be led by user feedback is the only way to be sure that you are building something people will actually use.

The International Standards Organization (ISO 13407) outlines four essential activities in a user-centered design project:

• Requirements gathering – Understanding and specifying the context of use
• Requirements specification – Specifying the user and organisational requirements
• Design – Producing designs and prototypes
• Evaluation – Carrying out user-based assessment of the site

Ruralnet used online and offline prototyping and user engagement techniques in an open process to develop the online systems that supported their community’s activities. They set up a website where they invited people to contribute ideas for development of their business, then held a focus group day, and from that developed systems to prototype and test. The process of co-design started before the technology was scoped out, and continued long after it was launched.

London-based user experience firm Webcredible has a great list of user-centred design techniques that you can try, whilst organisations like Flow Interactive even use ethnographic research processes to understand the needs and aspirations that users can’t articulate.

Don’t get too bogged down though: the most important thing is to spend time with your users and really get to know them, and keep on trying out the tools with them throughout the development process. In the early stages of the project you’ll mostly be talking to users and holding general conversations about what they need. As your tools and community develop, there’s much more you can do to evolve the technology.