5 Barriers to Effective User-Centered Design
The user-centered design (UCD) process delivers solutions that work and products that people truly want and need. It puts user experience at the heart of the creative journey helping businesses to target their efforts and resources for maximum positive impact. However, there are also many barriers to user-centered design that can stifle the process.
UCD helps projects to produce and exceed their expected return on investment (ROI), but some blocks stand in its way. Misunderstandings, miscommunications, and misalignment can prevent businesses from creating a great product the first time around.
Here we outline the steps you can take to overcome these barriers, save time and money, and create products that users want and need.
The Consequences of Failing to Prepare
When potential challenges are ignored, it becomes more difficult to allocate the resources necessary to overcome them. Stakeholders also need clearly articulated goals, roadmaps, and processes to remain focused and productive.
A lack of preparation puts the bottom line at risk. It costs significantly more to rework software after the fact than it does to carefully plan and execute a successful solution to begin with. NASA research shows that it costs six times more to resolve a problem once it’s reached the design phase – let alone progressed any further.
In other words, Benjamin Franklin put it best when he said: “By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail.”
Barriers to User-Centered Design
It’s impossible to plan around the barriers to effective UCD without understanding what they are. Although organizations are likely to encounter project-specific barriers, these are some of the most common obstacles to the effective execution of the UCD process:
A Lack of Stakeholder Buy-in
It’s often hard for stakeholders who are not familiar with the user-centered design lifecycle to see the value in the detailed research. Involving users from the outset can be difficult for individuals at all levels. Those who are not experienced with the concept can easily default to their personal assumptions and could ultimately lose sight of user needs.
False Assumptions of Costs
Organizations often budget for contextual inquiries and initial exploration of user needs, yet still fail to appreciate the total costs of a project. A common misconception is that research ends when you start designing, but user research should be an iterative process. A failure to account for ongoing costs throughout the UCD lifecycle can quickly derail plans and prevent them from delivering the anticipated ROI.
Acting on Personal Biases
It’s easy to get caught in a bubble when you’re close to a project. This can leave the development of a solution at the mercy of personal biases and beliefs about what users want. Failing to frequently check back with users can lead to the creation of products that don’t align with their actual needs.
Misunderstanding User Environments
Similarly, failing to properly understand the real-world environments that solutions will be deployed into can prevent designers and developers from properly addressing user requirements. Practical issues relating to the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) are often misunderstood when stakeholders don’t intimately know the use case for their creations.
Failing to Define a ‘Good’ Product
There are many layers to a ‘good’ product, making it hard to get alignment on goals and the performance metrics to measure success. UX researchers may agree on what users need while developers may instead focus on the simplest solution from a software engineering perspective. Projects are most successful when there is buy-in from all stakeholders, allowing everyone to work together towards a common, user-focused result.
Avoid Barriers and Secure Success
Awareness and planning for these barriers to success can go a long way to securing the ROI promised by a particular solution. With this in mind, the following steps can help organizations evade or overcome the challenges we’ve discussed:
Understand User Environments
Stepping into the user environment can help researchers, designers, and developers to tailor the solutions they create to address users’ specific problems.
Taking pictures of the environment and asking searching questions of users allows designers and developers to create features that improve user adoption. This information may even highlight quick fixes (such as UI color changes) that make a substantial difference in the field.
Evaluate Current Technology
Sometimes the products you already have are close to meeting the needs of users. Design teams often assume they need to conduct new research or create a product from scratch when existing solutions may already offer answers. It’s possible to avoid inflating the costs of development and design by reviewing the existing technology you’re starting with.
Communicate Effectively
Open lines of communication are the cornerstone of the UCD process. Developers, designers, and researchers need to be able to exchange ideas freely while also involving users from an early stage. Stakeholder buy-in also depends on effective internal communication which can help multi-disciplinary teams to understand their collective goals.
Build Diverse Teams
Diversity is a catalyst for better product design, allowing stakeholders from various disciplines and fields to bring their unique insights to the table. The involvement of people with varying experiences and skillsets can often lead to the emergence of new challenges and conflicts. These should also be viewed as part of the UCD lifecycle and can help the entire team to better understand the task ahead of them.
Manage the Project
The value of a good project manager should not be understated. A person who has the time, space, and resources to focus on the bigger picture can bring together many various strands of work to achieve better results. They can also identify and manage risks, facilitate communication between teams, and keep track of the project’s moving parts.
Better Projects for Better Products
UCD helps companies to build solutions that deliver real ROI, creating products that people want. To do this, teams must go back to basics and work with the people for which they are designing, but there are still obstacles along the way. You can unlock the best outcomes for your project by foreseeing and planning for these challenges from the outset.
Acting as an extension of our client’s teams, Daito provides a clear and executable roadmap to delivering user-focused results. Our experts collaborate with stakeholders from multiple fields to create the best possible products by preparing for the potential barriers of user-centered design. Through the application of the right resources, methodology, and education, we help organizations realize the true potential of their solutions.
Focusing your design by involving the user is a way to make better products that serve their true needs. With careful planning and consideration, you can also serve the needs and ambitions of your business.