Abstract
User-centred design (UCD) has been widely used to solve those failure products that are not proper designed for target users. Although UCD techniques are varies, some similar drawbacks were found as it requires complex skills to manipulate and it is time consuming as well as costly. Big enterprises have no problem with carrying out UCD because of rich resources. However, most of researchers made effort on the improvement of approaching UCD. Lack of studies contributed to the area of promotion UCD to those companies which do not launch UCD correctly or barely know UCD. Neither any of studies addressed on the investigation in difficulties those companies have and therefore helped them to be solved. Hence, this research aimed to assess a cost-effective UCD model to assist designers in idea generation. 16 designers were invited into the two-phase assessment. In addition, there were 51 end users as the participants to evaluate that if the designers who followed the proposed model can generate better UCD ideas. In this project, an MP3 was chosen because it is portable, easy, and with both aesthetics and functionality factors. In addition, 25-34 office workers were selected as the target users as the participants. This research was a whole process of the assessment of a cost-effective UCD model in assist designers’ idea generation, and this assessment successfully showed that the cost-effective UCD model could eliminate the complex of the UCD skills and the cost, in which the UCD results were identified by the users. Therefore it could encourage more designers to apply UCD in their work. Further recommendations were also illustrated in this paper.
Keywords: User-centred design, personas, idea generation.
Introduction
Today, user-centred design (UCD) is widely regarded as the design philosophy that defines how a design should be made by understanding the user’s needs. In addition, the whole design process is examined iteratively to be user-centric by the guideline ISO 13407 to enhance the practice of UCD [1].
Nevertheless, UCD is now used more in only large enterprises even though there are several approaches to achieving UCD, such as contextual design, participatory design and empathic design. The difficulties for small-companies are as follow: the involvement of users makes the design costly; to understand the users’ behaviour needs professional skills [2]; the design process is longer when users are involved. Consequently, empathic design focuses on more aspects for helping the designers in the early stages of design. In addition, although empathic design offers "observation" as the method, the key point is to understand the users. Therefore, we adapt the meaning "understanding of users" as the basis of empathic design. Just to ask designers to think and behave like users could be a comparatively cheap solution as there is no "real user" involvement. Hence, the researchers suggested a model based on empathic thinking in order to help designers in the early stages of design to promote the benefits of cost effectiveness that are easy to manipulate. However, since there are no real users directly involved in the design process, we used the personas as "virtual users" to reinforce the engagement of designers and users in empathic design. Personas are usually used as a bridge for design communication [3]. And here they help designers to concentrate more when thinking about users.
Plenty of literatures addressed the creating of personas but none of them evaluate the effectiveness as this paper. Especially this paper focused on the encouraging UCD from non UCD designers, none of papers contributed in this area.
This paper aims to assess the use model to find out whether the model could help designers in design to undertake UCD more easily, enabling it to be more cost and time efficient. By doing this, we can persuade more usage of UCD.
There were 16 designers invited into the first two stage of assessment In the final stage, there were 51 end users as the participants to evaluate that if the designers who follow the proposed model can generate better UCD ideas. In this project, an MP3 was chosen because it is portable, easy, and with both aesthetics and functionality factors. In addition, 25-34 office ladies were selected as the target users. The evaluations from the target-users were also tested to evaluate if the proposed model can help designers in UCD idea generation.
The result showed the ideas generated by the proposed model were more likely chosen by target users. In another words, the model provided a user-centred guide for design practitioners. Besides, questionnaires from designers showed that designers’ satisfaction of this proposed model has significantly high rate. This research therefore verified a personas-based model which can help designers work with UCD principal. Especially this model cut the research and design work into two parts and reduced the level of complexity of UCD. Hence this model can promote the use of UCD in the small companies or companies with small budget. The research constraints were given, as well as future suggestions.
Empathic Design. This is an approach to UCD where the designer attempts to get closer to the lives and experiences of users and to apply the knowledge from end-users during the design process. The goal of empathic design is to ensure that the product or service is designed to meet the needs of the end-users and is usable. Nevertheless, the users are only indirectly involved in the design project. It therefore tends to become ‘designer-centred’ instead of UCD. Additionally, professionals in empathic design promote the use of observation [2], although sometimes it is difficult to have the chance to freely observe the users in a particular situation. In addition to this, the involvement of users requires the design to need more skills and costs. Consequently, in the proposed model, "personas" are used to overcome these issues and enhance the use of empathic design.
Personas. Since Alan Cooper [4] first promoted personas in his book, "The Inmates are Running the Asylum", personas have been widely used in the computer science domain. Personas provide user profiles that can represent a group of people. The two main benefits of the use of personas are for communication between teams and to help designers to focus more on their users. More findings, in terms of the use of personas, have been researched by Microsoft. In their work, they used personas to develop their popular software, such as "Office" and "Messenger", finding that the use of personas was a great benefit to design tasks. In addition, famous Japanese businesses are using them for organisation communication.
During this research, the authors used personas as the key technique and, inheriting many of the advantages from work previous to this research, we intend to investigate how personas can help a designer to develop their product concept in their individual work. In other words, this research will not concentrate on communication between teams, one of the biggest beneficial functions. Instead, this research will analyse the aspects that the individual designer can use to connect UCD. In addition, although plenty of research addressed the work of creating a persona, lack of literature addressed on the evaluation of the area where designers have less UCD experiences.
Methods
The aim of this study is to assess a cost-effective UCD model to benefit designers’ idea generation in order to promote UCD to non-UCD designers. However, this model is also suitable to compensate general UCD design method when the user is not available. Additionally, there are two main objectives of this research:
1. To launch the proposed model and compare with the results before the use of the proposed model. In addition, the satisfaction of designers in using this proposed model will be surveyed by questionnaires.
2. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model with preset target users. This is to access if the effective UCD model can actually be user-preferred.
Based on the objectives, we selected methods for two-phase assessments and a final UCD evaluation with preset target users. For the first objective, we tried to conduct the proposed model and compare the data after use proposed model and before. In addition, designers’ satisfactions were survey and further expertise opinions were used to refine the model. The methods we selected here are the questionnaires and the think-aloud for the small design tasks.
The second objective was implemented from users’ vision. We used the results of idea generation by designers to assess with the preset target users, who are the 25-34 office female workers.
The proposed model: empathic design with personas: As introduced in the previous sections, the empathic design focuses more in the early stage of design and would be a possible cost-effective method if we set the "virtual users" in this proposal. As we called "virtual users" here, is to differentiate between other UCD approaches In other words, we only took the idea of "empathic" to understand and think like the users instead of traditional observations from users. As a result, due to the lack of real user involvement, empathic design is an economic approach compared to participatory design and contextual design. In addition, we adapted the personas to reinforce the existence of the users.
Based on the concept above, Chen et al. [5] constructed the personas-based model. The model aimed to make personas be integrated into designers’ current work. Moreover, the use of personas and the creating of the personas were cut into two parts in order to make the proposed model more modularized to adjust the sequence of workflow when it is needs. The model also suggested making the creation of personas to be as simple as possible since practitioners have less research background. Also, the amount of personas can be acquired subjected to the need of designers. The other benefit from this model is that this model only tells designers to look the generated personas when each idea is generating. It does not need very complicated skill to manipulate. The model is shown in Figure 1.
Fig. 1. The demonstration of the cost-effective UCD model
The Plan of the Assessment with Designers: Accordingly, we have arranged a two-phase assessment with designers and one assessment with end users. The purpose of the two-phase assessment is to get the generated ideas and compare them. Furthermore, the target users in the final evaluation will evaluate the idea set. The illustration of the two-phase plan is showed in Figure 2.
Fig. 2. The Illustration of the two-phase assessment with designers
We invited 16 designers to participate in the experiments. Even though this research can be relevant to various product categories, the researchers defined some control factors in order to examine the comparable information in this experiment.
Firstly, we assigned the same product in all the design tasks in which designers were asked to develop their product concepts. Additionally, the participants were required to have a similar background and to be able to manage the development of a design concept for a single product. Moreover, the designated task was confined to designing a product for use by an individual instead of a multi-user product. Each designer-participant spent about 30 minutes undergoing interviews and the design tasks. Besides, the design task needed to contain the appearance, function and usability in order to project the three emotional layers.
The authors chose a portable MP3 player for the group "ages 25-34, office workers" as the experimental task. MP3 player is mostly for individual use. Some product such as a remote controller is a multi-user device, which will bring more complicated factors to the research. Therefore, a personal use product was specified to simplify the use of the personas.
Assessment Phase I (The Investigation of the Current Design Pattern). In this task, we are going to examine whether the designers could focus on users to launch emotional design, and to find out the current design problems.
Assessment Phase II (The Investigation of the Use of the Model). The second phase is to introduce the personas-based model in order to investigate how they can help with the design task. Before the task is examined, some assumptions are proposed: The designers are trained to have the common design skills and they are assumed to have the imagination for the operation of fictional characters. Otherwise, the participants and the target task remained the same as for the first phase.
The persona should be developed from the anthropology survey, except for the name and the photo, according to the previous literature. This is to avoid stereotyping a persona from familiar names and photos. Additionally, for reasons of ethics, it is essential to protect any private and personal data. Therefore, this study licensed photos from the FERET database which is usually used in face recognition. The database captured various emotions from each person. Nevertheless, in this experiment, we only took smile face to link the emotional design as the example photos in Figure 3 left side.
The point of this research is the assessment of understanding designers’ current work of idea generation by the personas-based model for them to easily design for users. Therefore, this paper will focus the interaction between designers and the per-sonas since there has been plenty of literature addressed the personas generation. Accordingly we simply followed the literature in order to generate a suitable persona. Olsen [6] offered the guidelines for creating personas and Pruitt and Adlin [3] provided more knowledge about personas in their book.
In terms of the photo, as the conditions of the tasks which specify the age and the gender, we randomly picked up a photo from the database above. Additionally, the names were chosen from the most popular UK names on the website. The profile of the persona was taken from a lady who was located in our target market segment. Due to the limited task time available, the authors only assigned one persona and assumed this lady is the archetype of this group s the illustration on Figure 5.right side shows.
Fig. 3. The left side is example photos from the FERET database. The right side is the persona in this task.
Task 2 took 10-15 minutes and the participants were asked to design, applying the same conditions as the first phase. The only difference was they needed to develop their concept using the specified persona provided. The persona is located within the same market segment, "25 to 34 year-old office female workers".
The Plan of the Evaluation with Target Users. This stage aims to evaluate the effectiveness of idea generation from the proposed model. This user group (25-34 office female workers) is the target when the designers do the design during the assessment. First, we grouped the ideas into two set, one set is the ideas generated before the use of the model; the other is the ideas after use of the proposed model. Next, we put the 16 sets of ideas of portable MP3 players randomly into the options. Then we invited the users to do the online questionnaires. The last part is to analyze the data to see which set of ideas were more preferred by these target users.
Results and Discussions
The industrial designers were interviewed in the first two stages. There were eleven senior designers with more than five years of work experience. Five of them were junior designers with between six months and up to five years experience.
However, six of the designers felt that they needed to study the market on their own before they designed. Consequently, to avoid unfairness in the experiment, the researchers further confined the task. We provided the same product information and only asked them to develop their product ideas.
Furthermore, the designers were asked to describe their current methods of practising idea generation and their general design cycle for a project. Interestingly, when the question was asked, "Does the user matter in your design projects?" only six of them answered "Yes", whereas nine responded that they did specify users but tried to ensure the design covered all user groups in order to gain maximum benefits. This demonstrated the current design problems that designers were usually asked to do design greedy cover the market as a result they seems destructive and confused the real user group as we will see this phenomenon in the following design task. The final participant believed that users were not important in their design. We also asked them how much they understood emotional design. Surprisingly, only one of them showed an understanding. Most of them either said they had never heard of it or they had heard of it but they did not exactly understand the definition of emotional design. These patterns will be examined in the design task to see if the interview answers were identical to their design behaviour.
With regards to the design behaviour, several methods were used to inspire design ideas. Most of the designers tended to get the design concept by sketch, brainstorming and information gathering. Later, we gave them a design task that followed their current methods. Before doing this task, a question was asked in order to record whether they had designed a similar product before. Four of them had designed once for the same market segment and two of them had designed the same product. This information was taken in order to compare whether trained-effect factor contributed towards any bias in the design process that we asked participants to do.
One important data of this stage is to understand the difficulties of practising UCD. None of them said that they have not heard the principle of UCD. And within all these designers, they do not have experience of gathering real users to explorer their needs and responses. They reflected that the design projects were mostly doing without real users’ involvements. This problem was blamed to the short design schedule and no extra cost was given for them to do this kind of user research. Some other difficulties of practising UCD will be revealed in the task in which designers were asked to generate their design ideas on their own.
Results from Phase I of the Assessment (Before the Use of the Proposed Model).
This part of result shows how the designers developed their product concept before using the proposed model. As can be seen, six of them were product-centred, which means the designer only considered the product elements to make it pretty, regardless of the user. Three of the designers tended to be designer-centred with five tending to be both designer-centred and user-centred. Finally, two of the designers were user-centred, but were easily distracted. While the assessment of this task, the designers were asked to sketch only due to the limited of time and to make the process keep consistent for every designers.
When analysing the interview results, we found that one of the weaknesses of the designers’ present work is that, regardless of their experience, there was less user-centred design. When we examined the status of the user-centred designers, when interviewed, the participants expressed that they were designing for the users. However, during the design tasks, the UCD designers were, unconsciously, designer-centred rather than user-centred. Another finding was that even though two of the designers said they had undertaken emotional design before, they actually regarded that "appearance design" meant emotional design.
Another drawback was that most of the designers were concerned with the design shape rather than functional design. Hence, we may summarise that the designers, without the support from a user research team, tended to ignore the users in their design.
Results from Phase II (The Investigation of the Use of the Model). The design task followed the same conditions as the previous task.From interviews and observations, the designers were able to explore more design ideas. Additionally, the designers were found to use shorter timescales to make decisions. There might, however, be some errors attributed to the training effect due to the same product for the same users assigned to the same designers twice. However, the supportive point from the interviews is that three of them had done the "MP3" project for the same group and one of them had designed the same product for a different group. However, there was no significant difference to the other designers.
One more important finding came to light when they were asked whether they felt the later concepts they made contradicted the previous task. All of the designers who were designer-centred and product-centred felt that the later designs were more likely to be suitable for the 25-34 year-old office female workers. However, the designers with more UCD in Task 1 said they did not feel there was a contradiction. They felt that Task 2 helped them to specify a design concept, such as a warm colour domain or a specific colour.
The designers would get a general image of this user by the photo, name and essential profiles, such as age and gender. Then they gave a rough appearance and sensory design. When the designer looked through the detail, they usually narrowed down the ideas in relation to the reflective part. Furthermore, they started to get inspiration from combinations of the details in order to provide a functional design, which is mapped to the behavioural level. However, we have no clues from the interview that they can do the visceral design by the provided personas.
In general, the participants were satisfied with the use of personas and felt surprised at the effect of them. They commented that the personas did help them to think about users’ emotion all the time without distraction. Also, they felt that this tool can help them towards self-communication and enable them to examine the ideas they made.
From the comparison of the task before and after the use of the persona, we can see the design tendency converged to a similar colour domain in aesthetic design. Regarding to functional design, ideas are fruitful but still stick on the users. In addition, when designers undertook the task using the persona, they tended to design quicker and concentrate more.
Furthermore, by conducting the phase II, we got an impressive finding in this experiment. This proposed method not only reached to empathic design, but also, designers do not need to be trained for this method. Even they do not know much about the theoretical part.
Results from the evaluation with users: There were 51 effective answered from online questionnaires, and all of them are Taiwanese office ladies with the age from 25-34. We labelled answered set of ideas into two categories: Proposed Model (A) vs. Original Design (B). And there were 16 sets of ideas from 16 designers designed before and after (the use of the proposed mode). The original data of sixteen sets from were shown in Table 1.
We used the paired-T test to analyze if the data is oriented to Group A (idea generated by using the proposed model). And the result shows most of the target users preferred the ideas generated by user-centred model as shown in Table 2 and Table 3.
Table 1. The votes from target users
|
No. of designers’ idea set |
Vote counts from 51 preset target users A (ideas generated by using the proposed model |
Vote counts from 51 preset target users B (Original ideas) |
|
1 |
28 |
23 |
|
2 |
23 |
28 |
|
3 |
38 |
13 |
|
4 |
44 |
17 |
|
5 |
37 |
14 |
|
6 |
41 |
10 |
|
7 |
44 |
7 |
|
8 |
26 |
15 |
|
9 |
14 |
37 |
|
10 |
30 |
21 |
|
11 |
15 |
26 |
|
12 |
33 |
18 |
|
13 |
25 |
26 |
|
14 |
39 |
13 |
|
15 |
33 |
18 |
|
16 |
20 |
31 |
Table 2. Paired Sample Statistics
|
|
Mean |
N |
Std Deviation |
Std Error |
|
Group A |
30.25 |
16 |
9.191 |
2.298 |
|
Group B |
19.19 |
16 |
8.758 |
2.189 |
Table 3. Paired Sample Test
|
Paired Differences |
|
|
||
|
|
|
95% confidence Interval of the difference |
|
|
|
Mean |
Std D Std Err |
Lower Upper |
1 df |
Sig(2-tailed) |
|
Paire 11.063 d A-B |
17.582 4.396 |
1.694 20.431 |
2.517 15 |
.024 |
These results show that even the idea generation by the proposed model is just a short time test. The model still can bring significant effect to the design work. And therefore the evaluation of the work made this research more complete.
Research Limitations. Some constrains were existed in this studies. First, the duration of task arrangement is limited, that may lead designers to design not as well as they usually do. Additionally the short period of time made the ideas less concreted. Second, the designers were asked to use one of their current design methods: sketch. Sketch is the most common skill of designers and hence it is good for the comparison in this assessment. However, some of the designers may tend to use more method to benefit their idea generation. Hence this part may contribute the bias of this task assessment.
Conclusions and Recommendations
In phase I, we found that during the original design, the design is easily distracted from users. And the assessment from designers showed the high satisfaction of using the proposed model. Besides, when evaluated the idea generation, the statistical results showed that the ideas generated by interacting with users were more attractive to the preset target users. This model is able to lead non-UCD designers to undertake UCD without needing to be taught further design knowledge as well as to design both aesthetics and functions.
Continuing on from this research, the authors would suggest to develop a CAD tool to assist the use of and collection of personas, since most designers have difficulties of generating personas. Therefore, this research suggested putting the personas generation separately. And the CAD may rise the willing of use.
