User-centred design

User-centred design is a design methodology that will help you find out who your users are and what they need.

Why it’s important

If you understand who your users are and what they need, you will:

  • understand what the application needs to do
  • know if your design is the right one before coding
  • reduce your initial development time and costs
  • reduce the risk of costly changes in production
  • improve user satisfaction

The user-centred design approach

User-centred design is made up of three techniques:

  • user research
  • prototyping
  • usability testing

User research

Your project should always start with user research.

If you don’t know who your users are or what they need, how can you be sure you’re building the right thing?

You should find out:

  • who your users are
  • the tasks they’re trying to do
  • why they need to do them
  • the problems they’re facing when doing those tasks

User research will help you to:

  • see the problems your application needs to fix
  • make design decisions based on evidence
  • understand what your users need the application for

To make sure your application continues to meet your users’ needs, you should continue to do research throughout the project.

You can learn more about doing user research for government services, in the GOV.UK Service Manual – User Research

Prototyping

Before you start coding, prototyping should be used to explore and test which of your design ideas is the best one for your users.

A prototype is a mock-up of how you picture your design working. It can be as simple as drawing a series of sketches to developing an interactive prototype.

Sketches are ideal for exploring and testing design ideas with your team.

a series of sketches that lay out each step of the design idea

Interactive prototypes are better for usability testing because they look like a real application.

a user using an interactive prototype of the design idea on a mobile phone

Prototyping will help you to:

  • explore and test design ideas much faster and at lower risk than using code
  • ensure your design is the right one for your users before coding
  • reduce the risk of costly changes in production

Usability testing

Usability testing allows you to see if your users can use your application or prototype.

Whilst an application will go through a series of tests when it’s being built, usability testing is the only one that tests it with real users.

Usability testing will help you to:

  • decide which prototype is the best one to develop
  • see if your application meets your users’ needs
  • find which parts of your application are hard to use
  • come up with ideas on how to improve your application

Usability testing is often overlooked, but it is essential if you want to make sure you are building the right thing for your users.

You can learn more about usability testing and how to request a usability study on our usability testing page.