Category Archives: User-Centered Design

How to conduct heuristic inspections for evaluating software usability

Heuristics are “rule-of-thumb” design principles, rules, and characteristics that are stated in broad terms and are often difficult to specify precisely. Assessing whether a product exhibits the qualities embodied in a heuristic is thus a subjective affair. If you inspect … Continue reading

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Communicating your mental model to the user: Design models and the system image

As a user interface designer, you’ll have a conceptual mental model in your mind of how the application works. In order for a user to be able to operate the application effectively, she will have to have a similar mental … Continue reading

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Understanding the process of user interface design

Designing a user interface for a non-trivial product is a complex task. One traditional approach to designing and building software products was the waterfall model, where requirements are first gathered and written up in specifications documents. These are then handed … Continue reading

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Requirements gathering techniques for understanding user characteristics

To gather requirements and information on your product’s potential users and their characteristics, you might consider using some combination of the following techniques: Interviews with users Interviews with managers and other stakeholders (if applicable) Interviews with subject matter (domain) experts … Continue reading

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How to write user personas

For each of your product’sĀ user segments, you will want to write up a brief description of those users in terms of their characteristics, general tasks, and usability requirements. One way to approach this task is to use personas, a modelling … Continue reading

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User requirements: Understanding your users’ characteristics

Once you have made an initial list of user segments or roles for your product, your next step is to understand the general characteristics of users in each group. Understanding your users can help you design the product to meet … Continue reading

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