The Importance of Finding Out Users' Thoughts and Feelings Before You Launch Anything

Why Human-Centred Design and Hearing Actual Users Is Really Important in Digital Product Conception

Human-centered design involves building products and services with the user in mind. It involves you as a business creating goods that meet a specific user’s needs and incorporate emotional design.

And your digital or physical product must have usability. UX design involves creating a specific product ready for clients to use.

And the product or service must keep your clients loyal to the product, so they don’t look for alternatives. This way, your clients can have a good user experience.

They’ll feel as though you specifically developed the product for them. The human-centered design also involves undertaking a thorough process of researching the ideal clients of your service or good and their particular preferences.

Yet, UX design involves integrating all the human-centered design results to understand the client better. User testing helps designers understand how clients feel about a product or service.

The tests tell what the customer sees in service or good. And User tests tell what the client hears when a product or service is mentioned. So, using a user-centered design helps you design a product or service that’s indispensable.

You can use different strategies to test the user experience. Specific tools like conducting user-centric design research and design thinking can help you understand your product’s user experience.

Web prototyping, interface design, storyboarding, interaction design, wireframing, and visual design theory are critical for UX.

Start Your Human-Centred Design Process

Human-centered design is fundamental. Think about your client as you design your digital product. Change your perspective and think on the user’s behalf.

These simple steps can help you launch a human-centered design process:

Rethink Your Goals

Start by removing your company’s desires. Conversely, rephrase all your objectives while wearing the user’s shoes.

So, instead of wondering how to grow your product by 15%, ask yourself and your teammates how you can make a better user experience for their clients.

This rephrasing can help you and your team members to plan with the actual needs of the users in mind. Fortunately, human-centered design is always a win-win.

Thinking on your user’s behalf helps you spend less time designing useful products. It helps you solve your customers’ needs, building customer loyalty and business prosperity.

Dialogue With Your Users

Once you have aligned your objectives, it’s time to confirm exactly how the user feels about your idea. So, initiate a dialogue with the users. Otherwise, you can’t really tell what clients want until you consult them.

Identify your target clients and prospects and test their user experience with your service or good. Or, you can engage your clients in beta stages or a prototype to get their feedback early enough and, while at it, solicit as much honest feedback as available.

Build engaging focus groups and create thoughtful surveys. Yet, regardless of the engagement tool you choose, the key to the human-centered design is listening.

Don’t make the interviews about justifying certain features of your products. Fully de-prioritize yourself even when the user feedback is degrading your service.

Also, listen to your clients with an open mind. An open mind will help you prioritize utility, customer loyalty, and success.

Aim at Maximum Usability

Human-centered design involves prioritizing the accessibility of your services or goods—designing products for everybody. Besides, human-centered designs involve accepting that not everyone experiences your service the same way as another person.

So, think about accessibility. Can other people with additional cognitive or physical needs access your product or service? Consider services that are available for all categories of users.

For example, you can think of the hearing impaired and capture video and audio services for your digital product. And for the visually impaired, think about how your digital product can be compatible with screen readers.

Again, some users can only navigate your website with keystrokes. And to attract them, all your functionalities must be compatible with the keyboard. Epileptic individuals and others with cognitive impairments prefer calm and clean interfaces.

Better yet, ensure your digital service or product adheres to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Observe Your Clients’ Behavior

Before you launch anything, consider your clients’ behavior. After all, human-centered design is very iterative. It matures over time, and implementation is never-ending.

So, you must remain curious and empathetic toward your end-user. And never make assumptions. Again, you must constantly observe your clients’ behavior.

And at all times, be in their shoes. Connecting to your clients’ behaviors and needs to help you design solutions with the whole usability.

Besides, a human-centered design process can only be successful if you constantly reflect throughout the design process. So you must be agile and willing to review your progress continually. You must be ready to go back to the drawing board sometimes.

If you’re designing a tech-based product. Consider these stages:

1. Observation

Watch and learn how your target end-users interact with your physical or digital product. Identify their facial expressions. Do they smile or grimace?

Are there any roadblocks to their use of the digital product? What are their general pain points? Answering these basic questions can inspire you to create a functional digital product.

2. Ideation

Gather your team members and together brainstorm guided by your observations. Ask endless why questions. And sketch out the clients’ journey using their specific client personas.

Brainstorm why some customers didn’t fill out your questionnaire and avoid thinking that any idea is unrealistic.

3. Rapid Prototyping

Prototyping involves creating a simple system for user testing. You can use cardboard prototypes to help you generate user feedback quickly.

4. User Feedback

After developing a prototype, take it to the users. Ask them whether your solution solves their problems.

What more adjustments would help your solution completely solve their problems? Get as much user feedback as there is to help you hone in your design.

5. Iteration

Consolidate all the valuable feedback and integrate it into your design. And remember that every iteration is an opportunity to succeed. So, constantly test your design. Seek endless user feedback and fine-tune your design to an ultimate solution to the clients’ needs in question.

6. Implementation

After prototyping and seeking user feedback, it’s time to implement the design that considers all the useful suggestions. So, implement the design while revisiting the first five steps.

This way you can continually meet your end-users’ needs and implement solutions that influence the company’s prosperity.

The User Interview Approach as a Way to Gather User Insight

User interviews can help you answer the question, ‘who will your digital product or service serve?’. And failure to get user feedback risks you developing an unusable service or product.

Yet user interview is a tool to help you understand your clients in-depth. It can help you understand your clients’ perceptions and experiences.

But you must also carry out a successful user interview. Otherwise, inaccurate feedback can misguide your design.

You must also think about when a user interview is appropriate. And you must know how to conduct it professionally.

Use a User Interview:

• At the start of a project before you define any clear concept. This user interview will help you understand your prospective users, their needs, and wants.
• In the early product development stages. Conduct a user interview when your product team has an early model of the design concept. Allowing users to interact with it can generate valuable user feedback.
• After shipping your product. You can carry out a user interview and combine it with your observation. This shall help you execute a contextual inquiry and help you understand how users interact with your digital product.

Benefits of User Interviews

• User interviews help researchers carry out user testing. The interviews help researchers gain a deeper understanding of prospective users’ attitudes, perceptions, desires, beliefs, and experiences.
• Moderators can pick up on and respond to non-verbal and verbal cues of the interviewees. This helps the moderators ask follow-up questions and probe topics more deeply for better results.
• User interviews are interactive and candid. Hence, they often lead to serendipitous nuggets of wisdom that researchers wouldn’t achieve via other methods.
• User interviews are quick and help researchers gather qualitative data. Besides, you can pair them with any other research method to conduct usability tests.

Human-centered design is the best test of users’ thoughts and feelings. Undertaking this process before you start your product or service production, can help you comprehensively address the users’ needs.

And you can generate user feedback through user interviews. User interviews help you capture non-verbal and verbal cues which you wouldn’t otherwise capture with other data collection strategies.

And when you need help with generating user feedback, Odaptos is just a call away. Contact Odaptos today for assistance on how to implement automated user testing.