Know Your Users

Understanding who your customers are and the needs your product meets for them is critical to designing an exceptional user experience.

We advocate a quick and cost-effective approach to user analysis:

• Identify who your users are
• Talk to users about their goals and experiences
• Document user goals and the supporting tasks
• Design the application to help users accomplish their goals.
• Validate designs with users

Investing a few days in user analysis up front can save you time, minimize frustration, and ensure that your end product is useful. Acclaro has extensive experience with capturing user goals through methods such as focus groups, contextual inquiry (shadowing users), interviews, task analysis, and involving customers in participatory design sessions. The outcome of user analysis is a set of personas describing your most important users, a list of those users’ goals, and a prioritized list of product functionality required to support your users.