Nowadays each and every website design and web development company follows a User-centered design process. Companies in this digital era focus more on a model of user-based design rather than pushing websites to the market as quickly as possible. User experience has become the most important area of website design and development. By user-friendly UX, web designers, and developers create high-performing digital products that match the user’s needs. If you are wondering what is User-centered design and what its primary principles are. Here we are going to answer your doubts regarding the user’s needs.

What is User-Centered Design?

UCD is the design from the point of view of the user. Website design and web development uses the data on user’s needs, feedback, and goals to create highly accessible and usable websites and apps.  

The hallmark of a successful digital product is that it solves the problems of the audience.

Discover the Process of User-Centered Design:

UCD is a design process that generally focuses on the requirements of the users throughout the design process. The final goal is this process is to create a product that is accessible and highly usable.

The UCD process involves:

• Conducting research on how the users going to use the product.
• Setting up the requirements that align with the user’s goals with the business goals.
• Creating solutions for the user.
• Testing the product and gathering information from the user.
• Applying the feedback to the product.

Creating a website that puts the user's experience first is the goal of UCD. To achieve that the web designing team generally follows these processes of UCD:

1. Research: Like any other project UCD’s first phase of the process is conducting research. The designer has to look into the people who will use your website and in what condition they are going to use it.

Creating a persona is an essential factor of UCD, as a persona represents your target audience of the website. When creating a persona you have to look into the factors such as behavior, goals, background, skills, needs, and attitudes as your ideal user.

Personas help you to simulate users and identify the needs and the user’s goals that must be met by your website.

Questions that you ask yourself before creating a persona:

• Who is going to use your product?
• What is the user’s end goal?
• What is the user searching for and What are the goals they going to accomplish on your site?
• What does the user feel or think using your website?

Creating a detailed user persona is important as it will help the user to understand the website more clearly. Knowing your target audience is important to provide them with the right solution.

2. Formation of ideas and concepts: After the initial research, you have to understand your target user and the problem that you are going to solve through your website.

Storyboarding and journey mapping are the most helpful tools during the formation of ideas and concepts stage. Storyboarding allows you to convey the user’s emotional state at each and every step. It illustrates the interaction between the user and the website.

3. Validation: In this stage, you will be putting into theory practice by evaluating how the users are interacting with the website. It is an interactive process that you with usability testing, can validate your ideas and concepts by observing how they work with the target audience.
4. Improvement: In this stage, you will be improving the UI and UX with the gathered information by using qualitative and quantitative data that you have collected from the validation stage.

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