The Three Steps of the User-centered Design Process
Ryan Hanau
Head of Design, CloudNatix
CloudNatix is a core part of our customer’s infrastructure and workload orchestration workflow. Not only does it allow seasoned dev-ops engineers to manage their complex infrastructure needs, but it also empowers developers and devops to do the same with a high degree of efficiency and ease. Designing and creating a UI to manage the complex world of Kubernetes, VMs and other advanced technologies is no easy task; however, democratizing access to powerful technologies is something that we’re passionate about. I’ve spent my career focusing on users and advocating for their needs, ensuring that their experiences are optimized and highly usable. With CloudNatix the developer experience is always paramount. One of the most powerful tools we use to accomplish this is the User Centered Design process. There are three primary techniques and processes which we employ during this process. These are:
Early focus on users and tasks
Empirical measurement of product usage
Iterative design
The CloudNatix recommendation engine was designed following the user-centered design process
An Early Focus on Users and Tasks
Our design process always makes sure to consider the user and their needs—doing so systematically ensures high quality. We are passionate about this topic and return to it throughout our practice here at CloudNatix. For example, when we are creating new features for our workload management product, we identify our users’ needs first to ensure that any proposed features directly match.These tie into our detailed user personas, afterwards. It is at the heart of our approach and what motivates us to do user research. When conducting research, users must be consulted throughout all stages in the product development life cycle, especially at the beginning. In the early stages of the product development life cycle, there is the most significant opportunity to influence the design. That’s because team members have made fewer assumptions.
Another way to think about this is when we involve our users initially, fewer changes need to occur to undo earlier misunderstandings. As Boehm has shown (Software of Engineering Economics, Prentice-Hall 1981), the ROI for usability improvements is substantial—10x when design errors are corrected in the development phase. Sometimes I like to use the metaphor of a carpenter building a home. Can you imagine what it would be like if they didn’t have a blueprint? That’s what it’s like when designers and their colleagues don’t have a clear set of user requirements. Now, extend that metaphor to consider how difficult it would be for a carpenter to remove walls or the home’s foundation. The same is valid for software engineers. Deleting code due to incorrect specifications is a sure way to make our engineering colleagues upset.
Empirical Measurement of Product Usage
Another critical aspect of designing successful products has to do with measurement and evaluation. That’s why at CloudNatix we have established a customer UX research panel to meet our UX research needs. We know how valuable UX research is for successful software development. This observation is the second principle of the User Centered Design process. Its goal is the creation of highly usable products that are easy to use and error-free. Usability tests are one means to accomplish this. Here users or “participants,” as user researchers call them, are given a series of tasks to complete using a prototype. The researcher measures their success to accomplish those. There are different success measurements or metrics, while some common ones include the number of errors encountered during the usability test, task completion rates, and time to complete a task. The purpose of usability tests is to identify usability issues and correct them before the product is shipped.
Iterative Design
The third principle, iterative design, indicates that the best user experiences are ones that designers and their colleagues are continually working on. After we design a product, we then modify and test the designs repeatedly. UX is a process of ongoing change and improvement that seeks to evolve the product continuously. Our design process for our workload optimization is distinctly based on the iterative design process. We move from concepts to high-fidelity designs in an ever-improving process. This realization is a fundamentally different way of creating products than how teams previously worked. By accepting one’s mistakes and being willing to improve them, we strengthen our work. In practice, this might entail beginning with a paper prototype and making improvements several times before moving on to an interactive prototype.
The user centered design process is a powerful tool that we use on a daily basis to drive our design activities here at Cloudnatix. However, great design doesn’t occur in a void. It is part of the product development life cycle. User researchers and designers contribute to that environment by identifying key questions and the appropriate methods to answer them. To be successful, we rely on the larger team at CloudNatix composed of engineering, product and many other key and important roles to bring the results of our User Centered Design Process into fruition. The end result is a developer-centric product that empowers our customers to innovate.