User-Centered Design

Creating applications that are useful, usable and pleasurable delivers significant business benefit through increased productivity, satisfaction and a reduction in support and training costs.

For most people who use the applications that we build, the user interface is the application. The success of any application that has a human-computer interface depends upon its ability to support the users' goals in an efficient and compelling manner. If it is difficult to use it is less likely to be rapidly adopted and will require unnecessary training and support. By developing intuitive and compelling interfaces to the applications we develop, ThoughtWorks delivers business benefit over and above the functionality required.

Our approach to user-centered design encompasses a number of techniques:

Ethnography

Software is all too often based upon assumptions on what users require rather than being grounded in what they really need. We like to spend time with users, observing their behaviour to understand the context they will use their software in.

Personas, scenarios and customer journeys

Compelling and usable interface design commences with an understanding of who the users are, where they are and what their goals are. We use personas as a tool for focussing on people, scenarios to explore how they interact with software and customer journeys to walk through how users will realise their goals.

Paper prototypes, wireframes and storyboards

It takes time to build a screen in code. It takes seconds to mock it up on paper. We storyboard screen-flows using a variety of tools, from pen and ink through to interactive wireframes, to articulate how the user will interact with the application and how screens will be laid out.

Usability testing

Core to the Agile approach is the regular feedback cycle. This extends to usability testing. From the early stages of paper prototyping through the showcasing of working functionality, we test the user interface design to ensure it is usable.

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