We, the people, have been around for quite some years now. Computers, software, applications and the web not so much. Therefore it is clear that applications have to adjust to the people and not the other way round.
Many design principles have developed throughout the decades, but the main difference of user-centered design to others is that
UCD tries to optimize the user interface around how people can, want, or need to work, rather than forcing the users to change how they work to accommodate the system or function.
Purpose of UCD
UCD answers questions about users and their tasks and goals, then use the findings to make decisions about development and design.
UCD seeks to answer the following questions:
- Who are the users of the application?
- What are the users’ main tasks and goals?
- What are the users’ experience levels with the application?
- What functions do the users need from the application?
- What information might the users need, and in what form do they need it?
- How do users think the application should work?
Benefits & Return of Investment
- Increased usability
- Higher degree of customer satisfaction
- Continued business
- Higher revenues
- Project management optimization
- Focus on important functionality early
- Unforeseen user requirements
- Reduced costs
- Training costs
- Help-Desk calls and service costs
UCD Principles
- Focus on users’ needs, tasks and goals
- Spend time on initial research and requirements
- Identify your target audience and observe them (accomplishing their tasks)
- Let users define product requirements
- Emphasis on iterative design process
- Evaluate system on real target users
Summary
Nobody could state it simpler than Susan Dray: “If the user can’t use it, it doesn’t work”.
Categories: Usability & UCD Tags: audience, benefits, costs, experience, goals, principles, return of investment, revenue, ROI, target, tasks, training, UCD, ui, usability, user, user-centered design, web
The purpose of web pages is to interactively display information. The Hypertext Markup Language was designed to encode meaning rather than appearance. Therefore
Accessibility is the extent of access to information on a webpage through user agents (e.g. browsers, screen readers,…) which translate HTML into hypertext structures (links, headers, tables, forms,…) in order to give the users a surplus value.
“As long as a page is coded for meaning, it is possible for alternative browsers to present that meaning in ways that are optimized for the abilities of individual users and thus facilitate the use of the Web by disabled users. Those disabilities are:
- Visual Disabilities
- Auditory Disabilities
- Motor Disabilities
- Cognitive Disabilities” [NIELSEN96]
Since Web pages are highly visual and interactive the most affected groups as far as accessibility is concerned are the visual disabled, i.e. blind users or users with other visual disabilities like color blindness and users with motor disabilities using alternative input devices or sometimes even just the keyboard instead of the mouse.
Everybody benefits!
In the same way a sidewalk curb is necessary for wheelchair accessibility it also benefits parents with strollers, children with rollerblades and elderly persons trying to cross the street. The same is true for web pages. Designing for accessiblity will not only benefit users with disabilities but will also increase your:
- Market Share Benefits
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- Repurpose
- Literacy
- Bandwidth
- Technical Efficiency Benefits
- Maintenance
- Server Bandwidth
Categories: Accessibility Tags: 508, access, Accessibility, alertbox, auditory, bandwidth, benefits, blind, cognitive, color blindness, definition, disabilities, explained, guidelines, input device, interactive, jacob nielsen, keyboard, literacy, maintenance, market share benefits, motor, mouse, repurpose, search engine optimization, section 508, seo, user, visual
