User-Centred_Design

User-Centered Design is a design philosophy that places the needs of the user at the heart of the functionalities of a particular product, instead of having the functions or information suit the system or programming already in place. For example, the way the machine organizes certain types of data differs greatly from the way humans like to look through it, and a user-centered designer's task would be to re-organize the original and re-gear it such that there is a human-logic to the way that piece of product works. Or, in the words of David Kelley, co-founder of IDEO, "a human-ness....designing products with personality." A simple demonstration of this would simply be the existence of wikis or even web-sites or web-catalogues. A machine would likely brandish an entire page of information on a single web-page without linkages or a good navigation system. A designer's task would be to categorize these information into packages that are at once both easily accessible and visually appealing.

The goal is then to bridge the shortest distance with the simplest of steps possible between a user and his or her tasks. User-centered-ness is superly important when it comes to interface design and web-design, or any system that requires an immense amount of information to be packed neatly and ready for simple digestion.

As a result there are many testing methods that are often used to test a product's efficiency, as prototypes gnaw through each intricate step of the design process. Some are outlined [|here].

Good examples of user-centered design that are the result of endless user-testings include Amazon.com's introduction of the tabs internet browsing system which allowed users to sift between main categories, iPod's renown navigational system, and the various products that [|IDEO] has offered throughout the years.

A few influential figures in user-friendliness: [|David Kelley's TED talk]

[|John Maeda's] (The author of Laws of Simplicity) is enjoyable as well.

[|Link to TED Talks] (if [|Stephan Sagmeister]'s on it, it must be just so cool!)

Works Cited

"Usability Techniques: User-Centered Designa nd Web Development" Jan 9, 2008 