User-Centered Design

User-Centered Process

The Digital Strategy team recommends following a user-centered design process throughout all stages of design and development. When developing your website strategy, consider answers to the following questions:

  • Who is your primary target audience?
  • Why are they visiting your website? 
  • What are they trying to accomplish?
  • How do their environment, attitudes, and prior experiences impact their expectations of your site?
  • How do users refer to and think about the information they are trying to find?

A deep understanding of your end users’ needs will enable you to make strategic, data-driven decisions about your website content, navigation, and design.

What’s Involved in a User-Centered Design (UCD) Process?

The user experience (UX) design process typically involves some version of the following phases:

  • Discover: Research and gather insights on user needs, behaviors, and challenges
  • Define: Analyze feedback and requirements from the discover phase to articulate the problem you want to solve
  • Ideate and Prototype: Brainstorm and prototype creative approaches to explore and assess your design solution
  • Develop and Test: Refine prototypes to create functional pages and conduct final usability tests with end users
  • Implement and Evaluate:  Launch, test, and monitor user feedback to measure performance and iteratively improve

Discover

To research and gather insights on user needs, behaviors, and challenges relevant to your site or pages, you'll need to gather data on:

  • Who your users are
  • What motivates them to visit your site or pages
  • What they want to accomplish on your site or pages
  • The environment in which they typically access your site or pages
  • How they will interact with your site or pages
  • Typical challenges or pain points

In addition, you'll want to meet with the sponsors and stakeholders to understand their goals, objectives, and requirements.

Some typical activities during this phase include:

  • Gathering existing audience and benchmark data relevant to your project
  • Analyzing and testing competitors' sites
  • Conducting a content inventory
  • Conducting user research activities such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, field studies, etc.
  • Holding requirements gathering meetings with project sponsors and/or stakeholders

Define

Insights from analyzing the data you've gathered will help you identify the key problems and opportunities your design should address. Questions you'll want to answer during this phase include:

  • What user needs, behaviors, and pain points have you identified?
  • What are the main tasks users want to accomplish on your site and/or pages?
  • How do users think about your content (e.g. how do they expect it to be organized, what do they call content, etc.)?
  • What language or terminology do they typically use when referring to their tasks or the information they are trying to find?
  • What do project sponsors and/or stakeholders consider the key project goals and objectives?
  • What requirements must be met for the project to be considered a success (key performance indicators or KPIs)?

Some typical activities during this phase include: 

  • Determining measures of success (KPIs)
  • Analyzing data and documenting user journeys and use cases
  • Creating task, process, service blueprint or interaction flows and test
  • Creating and testing information architecture
  • Finalizing information architecture and user experience

Ideate and Prototype

During the ideate and prototype phase, teams brainstorm, prototype, and test a range of creative solutions based on the problems and opportunities they identified in the Define phase. This iterative process helps refine and narrow down ideas to identify the best solution to build in the Develop and Test phase. 

Some typical tasks during this phase of the process include:

  • Brainstorming UX and user interface (UI) design approaches
  • Brainstorming technical approaches and feasibility of identified features and functionality
  • Sketching and storyboarding the user experience or interaction flow
  • Wireframing, testing, and refining your user experience and interface solutions
  • Creating interactive prototypes, test and refine
  • Creating style guides

Develop and Test

In the develop and test phase of the UCD process, the final solution is refined and rigorously tested with actual end users. This phase helps identify any remaining issues that need to be addressed to ensure usability and adherence to project requirements.

Some typical tasks during this phase of the process include:

  • Finalizing UX and UI decisions and documenting for developers
  • Implementing backend features if required
  • Building final website or pages including interactive components
  • Testing and refining site or pages

Implement and Evaluate

During this final phase of the UCD process, the project is launched with a plan for ongoing assessment to measure its effectiveness and make iterative improvements. This phase ensures that the project performs as intended and continues to evolve based on users' changing needs.

Some typical tasks during this phase of the process include:

  • Launching the site or pages
  • Conducting post-launch usability studies
  • Conducting iterative competitive analysis, A/B testing, and user testing
  • Checking analytics and reporting on site or page performance (KPIs)