User-centered design is a philosophy and a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of the end user of an interface or document are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process. It is often seen as an offshoot of the usability movement, and a progenitor of the experience design and interaction design movements.
#14519
Involving Users Throughout The Information Development Process 
Testing documents for usability is critical, but we don’t always get to do it. Even when we do, too often, it’s too little, too late. What we really want are documents that we are fine-tuning in usability testing because they already meet users’ needs, match our users’ mental models, and fit with the way that our users work.
Redish, Janice C. 'Ginny'. STC Proceedings (1994). Presentations>User Centered Design>Usability
#28220
If it is your side column on your website you want it. But does your user see or even read it? You might argue that the sidecolumn is a common standard. So we do need it. Do we?
Information Architects Japan (2006). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design
#28645
Sizing UCD projects presents special challenges to usability practitioners and consultants. Each project and UCD methodology comes with its own set of variables that makes it difficult to accurately estimate resource requirements and completion times.
Usability Body of Knowledge (2007). Articles>Usability>User Centered Design>Project Management
#31611
It's a People Thing: The Switch to Reader-Centered Documents
One of the central causes of poor writing is a lack of a thorough understanding of the audience. What are the problems that readers have to solve, and how can we help them? Too many writers believe that people will understand what they have written just because the writers themselves understand it. Good writing always begins with a study of the readers' reading skills, their actual physical situation, the problems they face, the motivation they need, and the actions they need to take.
DuBay, William H. Impact Information (2003). Articles>Writing>Rhetoric>User Centered Design
#24850
It's Not Enough to Say What it Does
All too often, developers think that documenting their new creations just means writing a detailed technical description of what it does. In a sense, they're explaining things to themselves. But what you really need to do is explain things to someone who's coming across your stuff for the first time.
McManus, Eamonn. Artima (2004). Articles>Documentation>User Centered Design
#19048
At the heart of any good user-centred design process is the practice of prototyping. By creating and testing interfaces in rough format, designers are able to feed through improvements and feedback from users quickly and easily. This in turn helps to ensure a final product that is an evolved solution, in the sense that it has been through a number of iterations and emerged as fit for the job in question.
Farrell, Tom. Frontend Infocentre (2002). Design>User Centered Design>Methods
#28957
Key Steps in Creating Your Reader Persona
The Web is about self-service and self-service is about simplicity and convenience. You've got a small screen and every time you add something extra to that screen you make the world more complicated for your reader. You must make very difficult choices if you want your website to work. You can't serve everybody, and if you try to you will serve nobody.
McGovern, Gerry. uiGarden (2007). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Personas
#18577
Key Tips for User-Centered Design
We interact with many developers when researching and designing GUI standards. Some of the recurring problems we find can be solved with knowledge of a few expert tips.
Schaffer, Eric M. Human Factors International (1995). Design>User Centered Design
#31738
The Kind of Documentation Users Really Want
Have you ever asked your users what kind of training materials they want, or how they prefer to learn software? This kind of information is critical to figuring out what help deliverables to produce. But really when it comes down to it, there are only so many options — printed manuals, short guides, interactive flash guides, videos, online help, live training, reference cards, context-sensitive help, workbooks and exercises, or, usually the favorite, someone to stand by their computer and answer questions whenever they need help.
Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2008). Articles>Documentation>Usability>User Centered Design
#18583
It's interesting to watch people using a Web site or online course you've built. When they click on the wrong button or mutter about not being able to find something, your instinct is to jump in to show them what to do. Or you may silently ridicule them for not understanding the obvious. But if we blame the user, we miss the point entirely. Navigating an online course should be easy. If the user is making lots of mistakes, it's probably the designer — not the user — who's dense. That's why it's so important to focus on usability when you're building an online course.
Shank, Patti. TrainingMag.com (2002). Articles>User Centered Design>Instructional Design
#26507
Knowledge Management in the Workplace: the Librarian as Knowledge Broker
The role of knowledge brokers as the gatekeepers of information is vital for successful knowledge management. In this context, the role of librarians who act as knowledge brokers in creating a market for both buyers and sellers often goes unnoticed. Librarians with their access to information and people, bridge the gap between knowledge seekers and knowledge.
Thaneerkulam, Chitra. STC NJIT Student Chapter (2005). Articles>Knowledge Management>User Centered Design>Workplace
#13945
Learnability in Information Design 
Design of information used for technical communication of complex products should consider how learnable that information is, and strive to deliver materials that are inherently learnable.The speed of information interchange and the demands of the workplace and school curricula require increasingly minimalist approaches to the material that is made available. People are frustrated by long learning times, and new users of software tools demand rapid absorption of tool capabilities. In addition, many readers of technical information are people for whom English is not their native language.Methods and practices that worked in the period when people were willing to commit to hours of study to understand a topic, or days of practice to master a tool, no longer work in a world based on ?internet time.? To assist our understanding of these trends in learning, this paper addresses three key areas related to learnability: proposing a definition of learnability, showing where learnability and usability intersect, and providing a basis for learnability based on some attributes of human beings.
Haramundanis, Kathy. ACM SIGDOC (2001). Presentations>User Centered Design>Usability>Cognitive Psychology
#28922
Basic problem solving still completely swamps any other creative concern when working on mobile sites. A refreshing blast of Spartan usability problems, mobile site design is uncluttered with your typical mamby-pamby web problems. Can a user get the information, and fast? Answer this question and you're far ahead of everyone else. The design process described was quite effective at powering through a lot of basic usability problems, but struck me as potentially ill suited to a younger project that might still be finding itself.
Lord, Max. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Design>Web Design>Wireless Web>User Centered Design
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Lessons Learned from Building a HealthWeb Site: Implications for Technical Communicators
The presentation reports on an iterative design process using formative evaluations to develop a user-oriented nutrition education Web site, 5-a-Day, The Rio Grande Way, for a rural multicultural population in the Upper Rio Grande River Valley in Southern Colorado and Northern NewMexico. The presentation will outline the overall project and then focus on three studies. Study One, used a card-sorting process, to generate the basic structure and labeling of the Web sites. Study Two, using verbal protocol analysis and a questionnaire evaluated the prototype for the Web site. Study Three, using verbal protocol analysis, evaluated the redesigned Web site. The presentation will share the lessons learned in developing the Web sites and the share the lessons learned for conducting usability testing and technical communications. The presentation will close by highlighting the technical communication and usability lessons learned.
Zimmerman, Donald E., Carol Akerelrea and David Buller. STC Proceedings (2003). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design>Biomedical
#22160
Let's Stop Writing Documentation and Start Working for the Users
Nearly 20 years ago, the profession of technical communication began to focus on developing task-oriented documentation. Although task-oriented documentation has always been produced, particularly for consumer products, it was not the standard in the computer industry. More often, people writing about computer systems focused on the system rather than on the tasks people needed to perform. Systems-oriented documentation was the norm.
ComTech Services. Articles>Documentation>User Centered Design
#20725
Let's Stop Writing Documentation and Start Working for the Users
Technical communication's long-time focus on task-oriented documentation has left customers with too many tasks and too much information; itï¿Âs time for a new approach. A user-centered approach reflecting a thorough understanding of users and how they engage the product is the surest route to effective documentation and training. To understand what users need, we need to get closer to them by spending time in their workplaces, watching them execute everyday tasks, and listening to them. Through this kind of ethnographic activity, we will become user experts, gaining credibility within our own organizations and our user communities.
Hackos, JoAnn T. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Documentation>User Centered Design
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Listening to the Customer's Voice
Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the software developer is sharing the vision of the final product with the customer. All stakeholders in a project-developers, end users, software managers, customer managers-must achieve a common understanding of what the product will be and do, or someone will be surprised when it is delivered. Surprises in software are almost never good news. Therefore, we need ways to accurately capture, interpret, and represent the voice of the customer when specifying the requirements for a software product.
Wiegers, Karl E. Process Impact. Articles>User Centered Design>Collaboration
#18914
Listening to the Learners: A Case Study in Health Information Website Design
An important mantra of user-centered design is to 'know thy user.' Accomplishing this requires one to decide what should be known about the user and how to gather the information. In this paper, we focus on the specific instance where the user is a learner. Specifically, we describe our efforts to listen to the learners of an information website, the Arthritis Source, and to act on this information.
Turns, Jennifer and Tracey S. Wagner. STC Proceedings (2002). Articles>User Centered Design>Scientific Communication>Usability
#32034
Literature-Space Vs. Cyberspace
Stories are so hardwired into our subconscious that it would not surprise me if we did indeed inhabit a story-space that is different from our web-based reading-space. This is a testable proposition. Do our brains work differently when we are in the middle of a story versus when we are in the middle of web surfing? I would be astounded if they were the same. But if that was all the happened -- different strokes for stories than for links, then the solution to exiting the web and entering stories is easy -- just read, listen, or watch more stories.
Kelly, Kevin. KK (2008). Articles>Publishing>Online>User Centered Design
#20364
Little Machines: Understanding Users Understanding Interfaces
This paper questions the ubiquitous practice of supplying minimalist information to users, of making that information functional only, of assuming that the Shannon-Weaver communication model should govern online systems, and of ignoring the social implications of such a stance. Help systems that provide fast, temporary solutions without providing any background information lead to the danger of users completing tasks that they do not understand at all. (Word will help us write a legal pleading, even if we have no idea what one is.) As a result, we have help systems that attempt to be invisible and to provide tool instruction but not conceptual instruction. Such a system presents itself as a neutral tool, but it is actually an incomplete environment, denying both the complexity and alternative (and possibly improved) modes of thinking about the subject at hand.
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Journal of Computer Documentation (2001). Articles>Documentation>User Centered Design>Usability
#25466
Load List Values for Improved Efficiency
Reduce the number of database hits and improve your Web application's efficiency when you load common shared list values only once. In this code-filled article, learn to load the values for drop-down lists when your Web application starts and then to share these loaded list values among all the users of your application.
Karanam, Srinivasa Rao. IBM (2005). Design>Web Design>Forms>User Centered Design
#18667
The Long List of Reasons Ease of Use Doesn't Happen on Engineering Projects
A list of the most common reasons engineering projects don't result in something that's easy to use. It covers diverse topics such as customer confusion, the impact of code architecture, the spinal tap commerative reason, and more.
Berkun, Scott. UIWeb (2002). Design>Usability>User Centered Design
#28937
Long Live the User (Persona): Talking with Steve Mulder
More companies are doing user research than ever before, but what is becoming of all the information? Steve Mulder talks about strategies for getting research into shape so real people can actually use it. The key: user personas.
Danzico, Liz and Steve Mulder. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Articles>Interviews>User Centered Design>Personas
#28529
The Long Road to Simple: Creating, Debating, and Iterating "Add an Event"
Sometimes there's a lot more to simple than meets the eye. To the customer, this is just a few obvious words in a small box. But really, that's the point.
Signal vs. Noise (2007). Design>Web Design>Forms>User Centered Design
#28358
Why haven't we figured out search yet? Amanda Spink talks with Christina Wodtke on why searchers still can't ask a useful question of a search engine, and how Google may be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Boxes and Arrows (2006). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design>Search
