On User-Centered Design...
Who are you? What are you doing here? How did you get here? And, why did you come? What are you going to do next? Did you find what you were looking for? What's your number? (You don't have to answer that...)
These questions are just the tip of the iceberg we know as the User-Centered Design process. Maybe "iceberg" isnt' the best metaphor. In fact, a solid user-centered design process can be your best friend. It's an integral part of the early and ongoing development of a product.
Consider the initial stages of a product's lifecycle: Discovery, Exploration and Refinement. During these stages decisions must be made as to the overall goals and scope of the project. Examining the target audiences both internally (business and marketing) and externally (customers and end users) can be done through user research techniques such as users needs/goals analysis and contextual inquiries to determine user personas and conceptual models. Competitive and brand analysis are also essential tools in this Discovery stage.
During Exploration, the development of initial design concepts, general navigation and content flow can benefit from the use of cognitive walkthroughs, heuristic evaluations of site architecture, storyboarding, the use of flowcharts and wireframes to diagram user flow, and fully-functional prototyping for usability studies — these are just a sampling of the user-centered design tools that can be leveraged.
During Refinement, functionality, content organization and designs are revised based on the results of feedback from these exercises with the ultimate outcome yielding design specification standards that will serve as a definitive guide for the product's implementation.
"Pardon me! That way is a very nice way... It's pleasant down that way too... Of course, people do go both ways."
— Spoken by the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger) in The Wizard of Oz, a Metro Goldwyn-Mayer film
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User-Centered Design