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Value of User Centered Design

User Centered Design (UCD) delivers value by raising the quality of a product. Users consider a well-designed product to be:

  • Effective – functionally fit; it does the right thing
  • Safe – reliable and trustworthy
  • Efficient – increases productivity and facilitates decision making
  • Intuitive – easy to learn and remember
  • Fun – attractive and challenging

Having a product with these qualities benefits the producing organisation, both for its own employees and its customers. We list some of the benefits.

Users save time

A well-conceived user interface saves users time in their day-to-day job. If designers truly understand the user’s tasks, they design the user interface around these tasks. A well designed user interface can significantly reduce the number of manual operations.

We know of one case where a very common task in a call centre (entering a trouble ticket) took 16 manual operations (scrolling, clicking and selecting) in one user interface and 4 in another user interface. This sort of efficiency gain easily translates to euro value.

Users make better decisions and fewer errors

Appropriate visualisation of data essential to the task results in better decisions and fewer errors. Errors can have far-reaching effects that need to be corrected. Some errors can even never be corrected.

UCD improves competitive position

UCD can make the difference between product failure and success. A user interface that focuses on task execution and hides technical complexity, increases chances of product uptake. Though a new product can be a success among innovators and early adopters, it is only really successful when it is adopted by the early majority.

In an e-commerce context, UCD results in higher sales as customers find what they need more easily.

UCD helps avoiding resistance to new products in the workplace

As many companies have found out, the user interface is an easy target for complaints. It may become the unwanted focus of attention, and be turned into an excuse to resist changes in work practices. Taking into account the user's requirements and needs mitigates the risk of this happening.

UCD reduces support costs

Creating user assistance (user documentation, online help or e-learning) and running call centers is costly. Although they are often unavoidable, the cost of user assistance and user support can be reduced considerably by designing the product for intuitive understanding right from the start.

UCD reduces design and development costs

UCD reduces design and development costs by:

  • Avoiding lengthy discussions among stakeholders through a healthy focus on the user, not on the politics
  • Avoiding to design and build functions that users do not truly require
  • Detecting problems with the user experience before a single line of code gets written

UCD increases job satisfaction and employee pride

Working with state-of-the-art tools that are adequate to the job can make employees proud of their organisation and their work. New employees, particularly those fresh out of school, are not confronted with antiquated tools and obscure procedures.

UCD gives organisations a more humane face

Though user-friendly applications give all organisations a more humane face, this is especially the case for governments. Well designed e-government applications benefit all citizens. Governments, more than any other type of organisation, have the pressing duty to behave well towards their customers.

Sources

Good sources of information on the value of UCD are available here:

  • On the site of the Usability Professionals Association -- a US organisation that does excellent work -- is a chapter on the Business Benefits of Usability.
  • The good people at the military (the UK Defence Department) also put out a nice brochure on Cost Arguments and Evidence for Human Factors Integration. Human Factors Integration is their way of saying: “applying methods of UCD to the design of products.” Human Factors Engineering is a rather old-fashioned way of designating UCD, but is still very much used in the domain of complex and critical systems. As a matter of fact, ‘human’ is probably a better way to designate the entity we now call 'user'.