Do you want to create your own digital innovation? Have you been through the failure of unsuccessful application developing? As new technologies emerges a lot in IT related field, for example, the clouds, big data, mobile computing or ubiquitous computing, people are looking forward to see new digital innovation created based on new technologies. Since new technologies are not innovation, the real digital innovation need to be created based on IT technologies, for example, by designing new software / hardware systems.
What should be considered before?
Traditionally, the systems are developed to specific categories of users, for example, amazon, a platform that provide a place for retailers and consumers to make the transaction. However, with the increasing demand of customization, systems need to be prepared to serve different individual users by adapting their contexts and habits. For example, personal healthcare system which records the data of individual users and provide personal healthcare suggestions. Also, for shopping website like amazon or other brand site, it has become a prerequisite to recommend the similar products for the consumer based on one’s browsing history and purchasing history, which is also fit the trend of self-adaptive system.
Therefore, if you want to develop hardware/software system the most important thing now is to identify your target customers so that you can design your system based on their demands.
User-centered design
It is necessary now for any IT related system designer to develop their design following the principle of user-centered design (ISO 9241-210, 2010), which consider user as the most important part when design the system. The term ‘user-centered design’ was firstly created in the 1980s, appeared in Norman and Draper’s (1986) published book:User-Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction and further built by Norman(1988) in another book: The Psychology Of Everyday Things (POET) (Abras, Maloney-Krichmar & Preece 2004). And it is been widely approved that IT designers should place the user at the center of the design, set the role of the designer as facilitator, to minimize the effort of users to learn how to use the product as intended. (Abras, Maloney-Krichmar & Preece 2004)
It is important for system designers to know the role and categories of users, and create system functions based on different types of user. In particular, however, designers may neglect some kind of users and uses during the system design. (Massanari, Adrienne, 2010) Therefore, we can analyse different kinds of users by establishing persona for all the actors (people who may use your system). In addition, it is also important to notice that the characteristics of users may changes with different time or context, which may also produce some obstacles.
Also it is useful to using some graphs to help your design, for example, the context diagram, and the use case diagram, etc.
Make your product valuable—create value for clients.
After identifying the users and what they need, what you need to do next is to design your system, to make sure that the product/service you provide can fulfil the need of clients and create value for the clients. The value here is not only the monetary value, but intrinsic value, the social and personal values.
Actually, as far as I am concern, the most important thing that will determine if a product or service can be accept by the market, is to see if the service, or product, can provide the solution that match with the needs of customers. This is the first basic principle to judge if it is a valuable system.
Also, it is important to keep reflect and test the design through different ways, for example, collect clients’ opinions us testing using and keep improving the design.
What I have introduced is just some simple principle and approaches of information technology related system design, and the specific process and approached of designing a system are no doubt more than what I’ve discussed before. And if you want to learn more about system design, there are still several further reading materials for you.
Hope you can learn something from what I have posted, and you are welcomed anytime to leave your comment or contact me to discuss more in digital innovation!
Still, thanks for reading my blog!
Xin
Reference:
- Abras, C., Maloney-Krichmar, D., & Preece, J. (2004). User-centered design.Bainbridge, W. Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications,37(4), 445-456.
- Massanari, Adrienne L. (2010). Designing for Imaginary Friends: Information Architecture, Personas and the Politics of User-Centered Design.New Media & Society, 12(3), 401-416.
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Further reading:
- What is user centred design?
http://www.userfocus.co.uk/consultancy/ucd.html
- Value-sensitice design
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=242493
- Android smartphone adoption and intention to pay for mobile internet: Perspectives from software, hardware, design, and value
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/07378831311329022
- The structure and value of modularity in software design
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