Armedia Blog

In the 90’s, when ECM solutions were rare, we could get away with designing solely toward requirements, but there is too much at stake nowadays. A recent study sampling various IT projects reported that:

• 62% percent of projects fail to meet their schedules
• 49% are over budget
• 47% have higher than expected maintenance costs
• And get this—25% are canceled before they are ever deployed!

If you’ve been in the software industry long enough, you’ve probably seen all of these things happen. The funny thing is, it doesn’t really come down schedule, cost, or requirements—it comes from bad design. When software companies think design, they’re thinking about contractual obligations and meeting commitments with their stakeholders. Here is a typical scenario:

Company wins contract. Client provides requirements. Company builds a solution, meeting the requirements. Testers validate requirements and application is deployed to a set of users. The users hate it and the client makes new requirements, company builds to those requirements, and the users hate the next iteration…and so on.

This can be resolved by utilizing user-centered design principles in your system development life-cycle. Software is not about code, it’s about people. Instead of our clients telling us what they want, we should be telling them what they need. As engineers, we can do a much better job building solutions then they can—that’s what they hire us for. To be successful, we need to incorporate user research, information architecture, interaction design, and usability testing into our process.

“Iteration 0” – 10 Tasks to Guarantee a Slammin’ User Experience

Let’s start with “Iteration 0”. This sprint is completely devoted to user experience. The point is to get out of habit of thinking of Java Beans and database schemas and start thinking about people. Here are tasks that need to be accomplished:

1. Gather assumptions and requirements. Take some time to get acquainted with the requirements and begin to make assumptions based on your experience with the technology.
2. Analyze competition. Familiarize yourself with the way your competition handles things. This is not necessarily the solution you should be striving for, but is excellent to have in your back pocket to show how your solution is better or to compare solutions to initiate change.
3. Understand goals & tasks. Comprehensive user research, interviews, card sorting exercises, and contextual inquiries help identify user needs
4. Develop personas and scenarios. Evangelize these with everyone on your team. They can be in the form of user stories, posters, work-flow diagrams, and profiles.
5. Build a content strategy. Find out what content you have, what needs to be developed, what needs to be expanded, and what can be cut. Also create a schedule for delivering those missing gaps.
6. Information architecture. It’s more than figuring out what content goes where. It’s also what information is most important to your users. Identify those needs and incorporate them into your design.
7. Prioritize features. One of the greatest advantages of user centered design is that you often find some requirements barely impact your users. Those requirements can be re-prioritized so you can focus on what’s really important.
8. Build wireframes and interaction designs. Setting expectations on functionality, how it should look, and how it should behave reduces future UI defects.  
9. Design a prototype. Build something you can take with you to road shows that incorporates both visual and functional design. Update the prototype during future iterations so you always have an accurate portrayal of what the product will look like at launch.
10. Validate usability. There are hundreds of techniques, including a usability inspection, paper prototyping, and eye tracking, but put something in front of your users frequently.

Points 8, 9, and 10 should be repeated throughout all future iterations until the project’s completion. When user experience drives design, you build products people love to use.