Supporting User Experience Throughout the Product Development Process

Prototyping and Usability Testing

Following the UX designer’s initial production of wireframes, the next step is to incorporate some limited functionality in them to support usability testing. The holy grail for systems of this type would be to support the easy creation of prototypes by nondevelopers, while also enabling an easy transition to a live system. This stage of the process is more akin to a conventional programming task, so our UCD tool should support it in the same way a development tool would—for instance, by promoting the creation and reuse of component parts, including their associated documentation.

Ideally, in the long term, our UCD tool could generate a live system from a prototype. However, given the current state of automated code generation and additional requirements like cross-browser compatibility, this is not likely to happen for some years. For now, our UCD tool should generate prototypes in a form that would support both remote and local usability testing, providing data in a format we could use with various data analysis packages—or even support data analysis itself.

UX professionals broadly regard the development of UX design patterns as a positive step. However, where we sometimes miss opportunities is in the collection of objective data that enables us to relate different patterns to specific problems, design contexts, and user groups, so we can understand which pattern is best for a given situation. When there are multiple, competing design patterns for solving a particular design problem, being able to capture and relate data about our implementations of the patterns and user response to them during usability testing could be critical in making the right design decisions. Yet, because of the difficulties of collecting, analyzing, and storing that information in a reusable form, such decisions may be made based on subjective criteria. This is not inherently bad, but it does not move us closer to a deep understanding of how to apply design patterns.

Post-Implementation Testing

Once a UX designer has devised a design solution, the wireframes capture details that do not typically form part of the business requirements—such as field sizes, interactions, colors and so on. Post?implementation testing must ensure that the delivered product meets these UX-specific requirements, as well as the business requirements. In its current form, Axure RP is a very useful tool for quality assurance testers. In addition to generating a printable report containing the specification details, testers can evaluate the wireframes against the implemented system. Integrating an automated testing tool into our proposed tool would allow it to handle many details of testing, freeing testers to focus on other important matters.

Product Lifecycle Support

Following implementation, the design artifacts a UX designer has created during the product development process should be made available as a resource to support further development or training of users. Because our proposed UCD tool provides a clear line of sight from requirements to our product development team’s implementations of those requirements and from prototypes to usability test results, it is much easier to understand the design rationale behind a design solution and, if necessary, develop it further. For busy teams, communicating design solutions in such a readily accessible form could support rapid shifts in workloads that would not otherwise be possible.

Summary

Why create such a UCD tool? We are hugely influenced by the design of the tools we use. They shape our thinking and the ways in which we relate to other team members throughout the product development process. A tool that put user-centered design at the core of the product development process and related requirements and usability test results in such a visible way to design artifacts would increase a team’s awareness of the rationale behind design solutions. It would provide team members with greater opportunities for input into both requirements and UX design.

Our UCD tool would let your product team capture an audit trail that would help team members to understand how and why decisions were made, make the relationships between requirements and their implementations explicit, and support reuse. While the UCD tool I’ve described does not yet exist, it draws on existing, readily available tools for inspiration. I have not proposed anything that is not technically possible. I’d like to hear about what you would like to see in an idealized UCD design tool. Please drop me an email or submit comments below!