Everyone has navigated a website or an app with a flawless and pleasant design. When using such an app, you intuitively know what to do and enjoy doing it. You may have wondered how people come up with such smooth and captivating design ideas. One of the practical design methodologies that helps with this is human-centered design.
Human-centered design is one of the web design services that focuses on the user. Thus, user testing is present from the very beginning. The results of human-centered design are certainly worth the effort.
Here, we list the primary artifacts of and actions taken when carrying out human-centered design.
Personas
To make your design fit users’ needs, you have to know your users. That’s why UX designers first perform thorough research and create user personas based on their findings.
A persona is a portrait of a typical user from your target audience. The description of this persona usually contains information about who the user is, what they need, why they need it, and how they can find it. The answers to some of these questions might be the same across personas, but there’s always something that differentiates one persona from another.
It’s crucial to identify all the personas for your product to develop solutions for all your users’ problems. Creating user personas helps you identify needs and implement only necessary features without wasting time and resources.
Scenarios
Scenarios are helpful to identify how users interact with your website or app and in what context. They are written in the form of stories and allow you to follow the whole user journey and notice gaps or mistakes to make the journey even better.
When you’re ordering web design services, you’ll consider several scenarios: the best, where the user quickly achieves their goal; an average scenario, where the user achieves their goal but is not impressed by the UX; and the worst, where the user is dissatisfied with the experience.
Detailed scenarios help you clearly see all possible situations and prepare your product to deal with them. You might come up with some additional details that help you make your product even better.
Your scenarios might differ depending on the persona and the context, so it’s crucial to work through them.
Use cases
When the scenarios are ready, it’s time to consider the user’s path in more detail. Use cases help you decompose long scenarios into small actions, allowing you to ensure that you’ve considered all activities and events on the user’s way.
In simple words, use cases describe each separate action within a scenario. Thus, you don’t have to follow the user’s steps during development but can develop features in any order while ensuring you don’t miss some step.
Prototypes
Now it’s time to implement all the use cases into a prototype. The prototype is a visual representation of the product, which looks exactly like the final website or mobile application but lacks most of the functionality. Prototyping is rapid and comparatively cheap, allowing you to perform user testing as soon as possible and get results without much investment.
Nowadays, many instruments allow prototypes to be live and function almost entirely as a real website or app, making testing effective and the cost of errors minimal.
User testing
Finally, when all the prototypes are ready, your web design company can use them to test your product’s design. This is your chance to check all the hypotheses at the root of your product.
You can ensure that users act as you’ve supposed, verify that the design performs correctly, and find out if there are some problems or obstacles with achieving the goal. If you find any issues in the testing stage, you can fix them with minimum effort. And if the product passes user testing, you can be sure your product design meets requirements and expectations.
Final word
Human-centered design helps you check on the smallest details of your users’ path and ensure that all user’s iterations with the app are well-designed. Such an approach lets you ensure your product is interesting, helpful, and convenient for your users even before fully developing it.
Being guided by human-centered design during each iteration helps you minimize the risks of creating the wrong product or an improper user experience.
Don’t forget that design is only one part of the full package of web design services. Research, development, and post-analysis are equally important. A successful product is the result of the right approach at all stages.