User-Centred Design (UCD)
User-Centred Design (UCD) is an approach that focuses on understanding the needs, wants, and limitations of the end-user at every stage of the design process, ensuring the final product is functional, accessible, and meaningful.
Understanding User Needs, Wants, and Limitations
- Needs: Essential requirements for functionality and usability.
- Example: A wheelchair must be lightweight and easy to manoeuvre.
- Wants: Desirable features that enhance user experience.
- Example: Customisable colours for a smartphone case.
- Limitations: Constraints users face, such as physical, cognitive, or environmental factors.
- Example: A user with reduced grip strength due to arthritis.
Considering the Environment
- Think about the context in which a product will be used.
- Physical space, lighting, noise, weather, and cultural norms.
- Understanding the user, their task, and their environment ensures the product performs well in real-world situations.
A touchscreen kiosk at a train station must be legible in sunlight, operable with gloves, and resistant to vandalism.
The Role of Empathy in UCD
Empathy
Empathy means seeing through the user’s eyes, understanding their frustrations, preferences, and behaviours.
In UCD, empathy helps designers:
- Identify Pain Points: Recognise challenges users face.
- Anticipate Needs: Predict what users might require in different contexts.
- Create Meaningful Solutions: Design products that resonate with users emotionally and functionally.
- When developing empathy, consider the user's entire journey, from initial interaction to long-term use.
- This holistic approach ensures a more comprehensive understanding of their needs.
- Think of empathy in design as walking in the user's shoes.
- By experiencing their journey, you can identify gaps and opportunities for improvement.
Case Study: OXO Good Grips
- Background: OXO designed kitchen tools for users with arthritis.
- Empathy in Action: Designers observed users struggling with traditional tools.
- Outcome: Its large, cushioned handle makes peeling easy for users with limited hand strength, while also appealing to a broader audience.
Understanding the User
Personas
Persona
A persona is a fictional but realistic profile of the target user, based on real data and insights gathered from user research. It represents their goals, needs, behaviours, and limitations to help guide design decisions.
- They help designers empathise with the user and make decisions that suit real needs.
- Personas stop designers from designing for “everyone” and instead focus the design on specific, relatable people.
Types of Personas:
- Primary persona: The main user your design is focused on.
- Secondary persona: A less important user with overlapping needs.
- Anti-persona: Someone you're not designing for, used to clarify who the product isn’t meant to serve.
Designers often use methods such as interviews or surveys to build personas, these methods are explored in more detail in A2.1.4.
Journey Mapping
Journey Mapping
Journey mapping is a visual representation of the steps a user takes to complete a task or interact with a product, showing their actions, emotions, and pain points along the way.
- It includes not just actions, but also thoughts, emotions, and pain points at each stage.
- Helps designers understand the user’s full experience, including where frustration, confusion, or satisfaction happens.
- Highlights opportunities for improvement (e.g. reducing steps, clarifying instructions, adding feedback).
- Personas and journey maps are not research methods themselves.
- Instead, they are tools that help designers develop a deep understanding of user needs, informing every stage of the design process.
The Impact of UCD on Design
- Reduced Development Costs: Identifying user needs early reduces costly redesigns.
- Increased Market Success: Products that meet user needs are more likely to succeed in the market.
- Improved Accessibility: Designs that consider user limitations ensure inclusivity.
Reflect on a product you use daily, for example, your water bottle or backpack.
- How does it address your needs, wants, and limitations?
- What improvements could be made through a user-centred approach?
Explain why designers would have used a persona and a secondary persona in their user research to develop a professional hair dryer for use in salons.
(6 marks)
Solution
Primary Persona (up to 3 marks)
Award 1 mark for each relevant point, up to 3:
- [1] Identifies persona as the profile of the main user: e.g. professional hairstylists who use the dryer frequently in a salon setting.
- [1] Explains how it helps identify key needs: e.g. comfort, power, speed, noise level, ease of use during long shifts.
- [1] Describes how it helps the team make user-informed design decisions: e.g. shape of handle, weight distribution, button placement, heat settings.
Secondary Persona (up to 3 marks)
Award 1 mark per valid point, up to 3:
- [1] Identifies secondary persona as the client, not the main user but affected by the product’s performance.
- [1] Highlights client needs like comfort, temperature control, noise levels, and drying time.
- [1] Encourages designers to ensure the product creates a pleasant client experience, helping salons maintain customer satisfaction and loyalty.
A startup is designing a meal-planning app. They have created both a primary persona and a customer journey map.
- Describe two insights that the journey map might reveal about the user’s experience. [2]
- Discuss one advantage of using personas and journey mapping together during product development. [2]
Solution
(a) [2]
Award [1] each for any two distinct insights such as:
- Identification of a pain point (e.g. user becomes frustrated when recipe search requires excessive scrolling).
- Recognition of an emotional peak (e.g. user feels satisfaction upon saving a tailored grocery list).
- Discovery of a fallback action (e.g. user abandons app and searches online if instructions are unclear).
- Highlight of a delay or waiting period (e.g. user waits too long for nutritional data to load).
(b) [2]
Award [2] for a clear, linked advantage, for example:
- Focused feature development: Personas clarify who the user is and their goals, while journey maps show where their frustrations occur—together they ensure features both meet user needs and resolve specific pain points.
- Enhanced empathy and prioritisation: Personas build empathy for target users; journey maps contextualise their emotional journey—using both guides the team to prioritise improvements that deliver meaningful user satisfaction.
