‘User centred’ design is a web buzz-word for designing websites from a user’s perspective, rather than from the perspective of the site’s owner, developer or IT department. This approach will ensure that the vast majority of site visitors will be able to find information quickly and transact with your site without difficulties.
Here’s an example to illustrate the problem of developing websites in isolation of users: many government websites DO NOT use a user centred design approach. A lot of government websites still contain navigational structures that replicate the internal organisational structure of the government department. Whilst this hierarchical break-up is perfectly logical to an employee of the department and can be navigated without a problem, most external people have no idea that a particular government function belongs to a certain branch or section.
Navigating these sites can be frustrating – I just want to pay my car rego, for God’s sake! How in the hell was I supposed to know that car registrations are handled by ‘Municipal Services’??
A better approach is to provide a ‘functional’ navigational structure that enables visitors to find what they need quickly and to transact with the website with minimal fuss.
A key part of user centred design is user testing. Most website developers undertake little or no user testing before launching their sites. The problem with this approach is that designers and developers regularly make assumptions about the usability of their user interfaces – but what might be commonsense to them, might in fact be completely foreign to the vast majority of site visitors. These visitors will not transact with the site and sales will be lost.
User testing can be as simple rounding up as many of your friends as you can and offering them a free gift (a gift voucher?) to see if they can ’break’ your site. You could provide them with a test script to run through or simply ask them spend a set period of time ’transacting’ on your site - make sure that they use all of the key functions of the site and then ask them a series of questions at the end of the time period to determine any sticking points. If there are common areas of concern among your testers, then it’s a safe bet that the usability of that particular function isn’t great and that your attention should be devoted to improving it.
Tags: design, testing, user centred design