User-Centred Design For Software Development
Many software development projects don’t deliver the expected results due to a lack of collaboration between different stakeholders. Everyone has a different take on things. Developers are immersed in coding; they can’t think of anything else. The interface designers are only concerned about customer experience. And then some businesses care about sales and revenue generation. Getting all these different people on a common platform can be a challenging task.
Now there is one thing that people handling the user interface of the software are often criticised for one thing, which is to consider the technical aspect of interfaces when creating one. The people who level this charge give the reason that interface designers focus on creating an innovative and usable design that delivers a solution to a user-centred issue. Now, this is often a costly affair. The interface designers have a rebuttal ready as well. They say that they can’t leave the user interface part to developers because they will only focus on designing an elegant solution and completely ignore how easy to use and appealing it is. These arguments and counter-arguments leave aside the most important stakeholder – the end user.
Why Is It Important To Care About End-users?
End-users are people who have a problem that your product is expected to solve. And they are the ones who will pay you to buy your product. So they are the most important people for you. Let us make one thing very clear here – end users are not always customers.
When you build a product that has all the features your end-users want, you put in effort and money to gain something over some time. Now it is imperative to make sure that you use your resources wisely and designing the right product. There is no point in investing time and money to build a product that is nowhere close to what your end-users want. That would be a complete waste of your resources.
When you put your users at the forefront while designing the product, you will be able to develop a product that does well for your users and the market as a whole. One of the first things you need to do to ensure this is to hire a software development company in the UK that has been around for a while, and that knows how user-centred design works.
What Difference Does The User-centred Design Make?
The user-centred design gives you a better understanding of the problem that the end-user is facing. The success of your product ultimately depends upon whether it can help your customers find a solution to their problems. It has very little to do with what features or functions your product has. So the first thing you need to do is to understand your end-users’ perspective, their problem, and their goal. You can do this by researching and modelling. Your objective should always be to come up with a product that bears a close resemblance to what your users want. It shouldn’t be about creating designs that don’t have a background as such. Making assumptions about your end-users and their need will not take you anywhere. What you can do is bring the end-users and the team that will be developing the product close to each other. It will help the team understand the ground reality, which is usually very different from how things appear in the office environment.
The user-centred design also helps in validating and testing different story concepts before the real development begins. So, if we consider Agile development, we know that it consists of incremental iterations of various phases of the software development lifecycle until the product becomes its best version. With the user-centred design, you can test different software versions in a fast and cost-effective manner. It ensures that iteration has a single focus, which is to provide quality code without the need for any re-work.
The user-centred design also helps you engage with end-users as customers. The customer for a software development outsourcing company is usually someone who represents a business. This customer will decide things a product needs to have depending on their business value. But it has often been seen that value for customers doesn’t turn into value for users. That is why it is imperative to work with end-users. User-centred design is this process that engages the end-users to ensure that product is in line with the needs of both end-users and customers.
