From the course: UX Design: 1 Overview

Understanding the benefits of user-centered design

From the course: UX Design: 1 Overview

Understanding the benefits of user-centered design

- [Instructor] The key principle of user-centered design is that if you gather data from users and then incorporate your findings into your product design, you'll be more likely to meet their true needs, which means they'll probably like your product more and be more efficient using it. But there's another big benefit to following user-centered design techniques. It's often hard to turn empathy-based concepts like users' thoughts, feelings, frustrations, and desires into something systematic that team members can use to build products. As a result, products tend not to make an emotional impact on users. The techniques we describe in this course show how to take these empathetic elements and turn them into something systematic. In other words, user-centered design gives you a way of adding emotional impact to your products. Development team members often find it hard to truly understand the wants and needs that drive users. Team members are often experts in their domain with a great understanding of technology and a systematic approach to thinking about the world. And users, in contrast, are often not so expert at working with software and apps and don't have such a focus on understanding how technology works. They just want their tech stuff to help them in their lives. If you apply it properly, user-centered design lets you translate the wants and needs of end users into specifications for building technological solutions. The user-centered design process I'll show you helps you turn the empathetic needs of users into systematic building blocks.

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