In addition to being a development methodology, user-centred design is a philosophy that is central to Qualicom�s core business. Whether you’re building a house or a software application, understanding the existing patterns and future needs of the people who will be using it is vital to success. And translating that understanding to an effective blueprint is equally vital to an efficient development process.

UCD can result in reduced costs through less rework and support activities, improved user satisfaction, improved profitability through increased sales or user productivity, and an enhanced brand image.

Qualicom has consultants who understand requirements analysis, user profiling, interaction design and usability testing. We can work with your design team to assist them in performing UCD activities or we can take on this role ourselves. We can also perform usability evaluations of your web site and application designs and document our findings and recommendations.

Our approach

At Qualicom, we’ve evolved a pragmatic approach to user-centred design by applying best practices to the development of our own development project, both in-house and for clients. We implement UCD in the following phases:

Project analysis and initial design

We consider the business challenges and goals, the application environment, project constraints, and branding specifications, and perform a user analysis using contextual interviews, focus groups, and various other techniques. The result is a document that sets out the generic guidelines for project development.

Requirements analysis and UI design

We combine the output of the initial design phase with an analysis of the business requirements. This is the “art” of UCD: deconstructing the requirements in the context of usability best-practices to produce a specification that acts as a UI development blueprint. The result is a set of navigation flows, wireframes that can be quickly drawn up and evaluated, and descriptions of the data and user interactions.

Implementation

At this point, the bulk of the design work has been accomplished and approved and developers can start to implement the system unencumbered by the on-the-fly design decisions that so often lead to unnecessary complexity and expensive rework.

Usability testing

While formal usability testing may take place towards the end of a project, at Qualicom we strive to ensure that users are involved at every step along the way. This helps keep the development on track and minimize surprises at project completion. It is when users don’t see the system between requirements and acceptance testing that they end up having to adapt their workflows to the system, rather than vice versa, resulting in a lower level of satisfaction.