User-centered Design - Purpose

Purpose

UCD answers questions about users and their tasks and goals, then uses the findings to make decisions about development and design. UCD of a web site, for instance, seeks to answer the following questions:

  • Who are the users of the document?
  • What are the users’ tasks and goals?
  • What are the users’ experience levels with the document, and documents like it?
  • What functions do the users need from the document?
  • What information might the users need, and in what form do they need it?
  • How do users think the document should work?
  • What are the extreme environments?
  • Is the user multitasking?
  • Does the interface utilize different inputs modes such as touching, spoken, gestures, or orientation?

Read more about this topic:  User-centered Design

Famous quotes containing the word purpose:

    With the breakdown of the traditional institutions which convey values, more of the burdens and responsibility for transmitting values fall upon parental shoulders, and it is getting harder all the time both to embody the virtues we hope to teach our children and to find for ourselves the ideals and values that will give our own lives purpose and direction.
    Neil Kurshan (20th century)

    I don’t like to be idle; in fact, I often feel somewhat guilty unless there is some purpose to what I am doing. But spending a few hours—or a few days—in the woods, swamps or alongside a stream has never seemed to me a waste of time.... I derive special benefit from a period of solitude.
    Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)

    God sent children for another purpose than merely to keep up the race—to enlarge our hears; and to make us unselfish and full of kindly sympathies and affections; to give our souls higher aims; to call out all our faculties to extended enterprise and exertion; and to bring round our firesides bright faces, happy smiles, and loving, tender hearts.
    Mary Botham Howitt (20th century)