User Interface Design

User-Centered Design

The goal of user centered-design is to create products that users find useful and usable. In addition, user-centered design for many products includes optimizing the interface for user performance.

User-centered design is an interface design process that involves a product’s users throughout its lifecycle. From planning through post-release assessment, a team applies data about users in order to define the product’s user interface approach, design the user interface, and plan for the next release.

User-centered design methods, including field studies and interviews, help define who the end-users are and how they approach their tasks. User-centered design methods provide information about users’:

• Knowledge.
• Behavior.
• Tasks.
• Work environment.
• Problems and constraints.
• Preferences.

With an understanding of the product’s users, the project team can design an information architecture and user interface with them in mind. However, this does not insure usability. The project team must also involve users in the evaluation of the design. This creates an iterative design process, including one or more rounds of design and evaluation, which helps to eliminate the majority of usability problems before the product is released to customers.

Benefits of user-centered design include:

• More productive and satisfied users; usable products enable users to do their work effectively and efficiently.
• Less costly and more efficient product development; usability is easier and less costly to incorporate earlier in the product lifecycle.
• Reduced documentation and support costs; usable products are easier to document and support.
• More productive project teams; user-centered design techniques can resolve design dilemmas.

Prototyping and User Interface Design

As part of the user-centered design process, early development of a small-scale prototype that follows human factors standards and principles is used to test out certain key features of the design. Later in the design process, we provide our clients with task flows, based on the information architecture studies, and mockups, based on user interface studies. We also deliver a level of involvement that best fits our client's needs. For example:

• Templates and a style guides for ongoing development of user interfaces.
• User interface design training to individuals or teams within your organization, style guides, and expert reviews of the interfaces as prototypes are produced.
• Prototype user interface designs for the most complex interfaces, leaving the less complex designs to individuals following a style guide.
• Mockups, defined as A model of a user interface that is used for demonstration, study, or testing,  for all of the user interfaces.

Graphic Design and Computer Programming

Atlantic Human Factors provides conceptual graphic design of, for example, icons, widgets, and screen layout. However, we do not provide logo design or computer programming services.