Why User-Centered Design is Essential for Memorable User Experiences

What is User-Centered Design?
UCD is an iterative design process that requires designers to focus on the users and their needs at every stage of the design process.
User-centered design processes need long-term thinking. Its the people who will be using the product and the circumstances and settings in which they will that drive design direction and decisions through all stages of the product development, launch and ongoing development. User-centered design executions are achieved through ongoing user research, usability testing, and iterations.
Designers strive to better understand through usability testing and user research:
- The objectives users want to achieve by using a product
- How people feel and behave while using a product
- The setting in which a product will be used, as well as any constraints that may apply
- A product’s optimal workflow and how users would complete various tasks during their interactions with it
How does UCD help Businesses?
Choosing the Right Pricing Model
It is almost impossible to select the best pricing model for your product without first considering the end users’ unique goals and needs. How can you determine whether users will pay for your product? Since you’ll be improving it by evaluating and changing it at any point of the development approach, the user-centred design process allows you to create something worth paying for to end-users.
Boost in Sales
Change in Business Attitude
Many businesses are unaware that their consumer approach is outdated due to a lack of practical customer study. There is a reason Netflix beat Blockbuster. The former had a clear user-centered approach that met their needs (immediate access to movies and TV shows), which others could not.
Risk Reduction
The blend of agile development and UCD (user-centered design) is perfect for large-scale projects. Similar to agile development, the UCD process believes in iterative progress based on an increased understanding of what works best for end-users. With UCD, working in sprints, scenarios of costly and large-scale improvements will be rare to your product’s design.

How to adopt the User-Centered Design approach?
Just like other approaches, UCD also follows an iterative method of Research >Ideation > Implementation > Testing > Release > Refinement.
Agile methods are gaining traction in IT organizations as a cost-effective and reliable way to produce applications that meet the needs of the enterprise. User-centered design is an extension of the Agile approach, but instead of using code as the blueprint, it uses visualization to express the solution.
It is essential to embrace a user-centered approach as early in the product development lifecycle as possible. This provides a clear image of how you will use their skills to improve the project to everyone who needs to be involved, such as research, engineering, or marketing teams. A robust strategy will minimize the risk of conflicting projects and wasted time, efforts, and money on unnecessary initiatives.
Read our upcoming blogs in this series for a more detailed illustration of how these methods can be adopted and how several brands such as like Airbnb, Trello, and Uber benefited from UCD.
“
People ignore design that ignores people.
Frank Chimero