User-Centered Design is a methodology to design, review and build the interactions between a human and a machine. User-centered design (or: user-centred design) describes the means to arrive at an effective, efficient and satisfying interaction between a human and a machine. User-centered design is characterised by (1) early and continual focus on users and their tasks, (2) empirical measurement of user behaviour, and (3) iterative design. User-centered design adheres to the ISO standard 9241-210:2010 on Ergonomics of human-system interaction, regarding centred design for interactive systems. User-centered design (UCD) is related to user-interaction design (IxD for short) and User Experience Design (UXD or UED) – where iXD and UXD can be considered as sub-disciplines of UCD.
User-centered design is an important methodology as it involves the actual users early in the design process: this avoids pitfalls where designers make assumptions about users, without actually investigating how users work, in which environment, for which purpose with the system at hand. User-centered design is not limited to online applications, it is applicable to any human-machine interaction.
For user-centered innovation, user-centered design is an important methodology to (better) align the delivered added-value to the desired-added value in the relationship between two participants in the solution. Both user-centered innovation and user-centered design involve the participants at an early stage. An important difference is that user-centered innovation focuses on the solution as a whole and user-centered design focuses on the details of relationships between humans and machines.
So in my vision user-centered innovation and user-centered design are complementary.
Do you wish to read more?
User-centered design has been briefly summarised in this post. A non-exhaustive list of starting points to read more on user-centered design:
- Overview of User-Centered Design on Wikipedia
- Overview of Interaction Design on Wikipedia
- Interaction design network in The Netherlands: IxDA
- Overview of User Experience Design and User Experience on Wikipedia
- Easy to read introduction to user-centered design by David Travis from UserFocus: “The fable of the user-centred designer” (2009), available as PDF.
- The ISO standards 9241-201:2010 on Ergonomics of human-system interaction — Part 210: Human-centred design for interactive systems.
- Conferences on human centered design: Many exist, here are a few: