Developing a persona-based user-centred design model in relation to idea generation that will both manage the product design processes and solve design problems

Abstract

User-Centred Design (UCD) was proposed in the 1980s and, since then, its philosophy has helped to solve design problems, regardless of the advances in technology over time. The standard ISO 9241:210 (2010), formerly ISO 13407, provides guidance in human-centred design principles and activities undertaken throughout the design lifecycle to further support UCD. In addition, since it was mentioned in ISO 9241:210, UCD has also utilised User Experience Design (UXD) in recent years. There are many approaches that support UCD to ensure it is more attainable when designing. In addition, large firms, such as HP, IBM and Microsoft, use anthropologists in their user research in order to make products more user-centred. However, the concept of UCD should, theoretically, be more widely used in all product design and it is intriguing as to why it is not as popular as it should be. As noticed in the real world, imperfect designs still frustrate us everywhere.

The aims of this thesis were to investigate the difficulties of practicing a UCD approach in idea generation and to design solutions for idea generation that would encourage further practice of UCD/UXD. In the first part of the thesis, there is an exploration of the problems encountered when practicing UCD idea generation. When examining the process, a multitude of problems were found, with most blamed as being costly, time consuming and requiring complex skills. In addition, it was suggested that a systematic solution was required to overcome such difficulties. Therefore, later in this research, a systematic model is proposed and evaluated using participants (both designers and target users). Due to the fact that design practitioners are not usually researchers, further help to implement the model in the form of persona application software is needed. Hence, the concept of service design was employed to further assist with the use of the model. In the end, computer-aided development was introduced, together with the integration of the systematic UCD model. The UCD model and the software have been evaluated as effective from both the responses of product design practitioners and end-users.

Future recommendations and the research limitations are also discussed in each chapter and the overall results are given in the last chapter. This thesis successfully provided the complete process during the exploration of the low usage problems of UCD, and solutions were presented to assist designers with their UCD/UXD in the future.