Have you ever pulled a door really hard only to realize that you had to push it in order to open it?
Yeah, me too.
More often than not, we facepalm into the moment thinking it’s our fault. But what if it’s not? What if It’s the door?! Who designed this thing anyway!
The godfather of design, Don Norman - who’s a professor of psychology and cognitive science, and a former vice president of advanced tech at Apple Inc says -
“Discoverability of a design is - when you look at something functional, you should be able to discover what it can do for you.”
The same discoverability principle applies to tech and software as well.
The world of SaaS is fast-paced, competitive, and dynamic. And to add a little more, full of users who want a seamless application that knows what they want before they do.
Queue user-centered design
What is user-centered design (UCD)?
User-centered design (UCD) is all about putting users first in the product development process. Instead of building a product and hoping users will figure it out, UCD focuses on designing with the user in mind from the start, so the product is intuitive and easy to use.
UCD starts with understanding your users—how they think, behave, and interact with your product. It’s about finding their pain points and solving real problems. This approach leads to products that don’t just work, but are easy and enjoyable to use.
The result? Products that users want to engage with. UCD reduces friction, keeps users around longer, and boosts product adoption. By focusing on user feedback and refining the product as you go, you can build something that actually makes a difference.
Why you should implement user-centered design
If you are building a product that you want people to pay you to use then UCD makes a lot of sense. In case that's not enough to convince you, here's a more thorough breakdown of why user centered product development is the way to go.
Product adoption
Product adoption is one of the cornerstones of success. When a user fully adopts a product it means that they have integrated it into their workflows and behavioral patterns.
The result of this is that the same user will continue to buy the same product from you again and again. Thus, a higher adoption rate equals more revenue.
Ok, so product adoption is good, but how does user centric design strategies come into play?
“A key purpose of user-centered design is to eliminate discoverability roadblocks and boost product adoption.”
Another way to look at it is one of the biggest reasons for customer churn is the lack of product discoverability and output. If customers don’t know how to use your product, they abandon it.
Poor user experience leads to poor product adoption.
Poor product adoption results in higher churn.
High churn decreases customer lifetime value.
And to put numbers to it, a 5% reduction in churn can lead to more than a 25% increase in profit.
Product usability
Product usability is how easily users can navigate and interact with your product. If it’s not simple and intuitive, even the best features won’t matter because users won’t stick around.
The negative effects of poor product usability are staggering.
70% of online businesses fail because of bad UX on their website/web app.
Taking on a user centered approach means creating a product that users enjoy using—or at the very least they don’t complain about it.
Note that usability has little if nothing to do with the product itself. You could have created the most fantastic features and amazing capabilities. But if your product is a chore to use, then most users will never make it to the awesomeness that your product offers.
Note that they don’t necessarily have to be super excited about using your product, but if it fails at ‘ease of use’ then it will not scale.
Interactivity
Usability and interactivity go hand in hand. Where usability considers the ease of use, interactivity focuses on creating a dynamic experience that keeps users engaged.
“An interactive user interface evokes a dialogue between the user and the product.”
The interactivity of a design translates to an engaging frame, visual design, and a coactive layout that elicits a person’s interest in using the tool/software. Below is an example of an interactive design frame.
Functional Design
The ability of a product or tool to perform a set of practical functions is the functionality of a product. How a set of features combine to produce a desired outcome is an important aspect of the user centered design principles.
Functional design is being able to carry out a use case with ease and with minimal clutter and distraction.
Here’s an example of a clean UCD of a front-end frame depicting the function of competition research by an SEO tool.
The 4 fundamental principles of UCD
Now that we are on the same page about the importance of UCD. Let’s dive into the fundamental principles that formulate this methodology.
Principle 1. Start with empathy
It all starts with empathy.
You’ve got to really understand your users—their goals, frustrations, and what they need from your product.
Get them involved early so you can build something that actually solves their problems. That means asking the right questions, listening closely, and using what you learn to guide the design from the ground up.
Remember that this is a continuous process. Create a user feedback loop to understand how your customers think and feel about your product.
Principle 2. Design as a conversation
Design is the dialogue between the user and the product.
Why is this important?
Sometimes the best way to answer this is through an example.
Consider the example landing page above. I clicked a link to read an article on emotional intelligence. Instead of going to the content, I was confronted by the landing page that made me work harder than necessary to reach the content. In fact, I didn’t read the content at all.
This example is a monologue. The user is interested in emotional intelligence while the app directs the conversation towards fintec hiring and setting up your home screen.
So in the context of a conversation, how could this be improved?
Provide information flow and relevant content. For instance:
The ad sitting above the brand logo and the main menu confuses the content
Align the ad with the content the user came looking for
The dominant placement of the ad gives it precedence over the content relevant to the users inquiry
The “Add to home screen” pop-up further hides the content
The first screen shows nothing of relevance to the reader to hook them to the page
Principle 3. Observe behavior, not just words
Interact, envision, and observe product usability.
Don’t rely only on what users say—pay attention to how they actually use your product. Verbal feedback is helpful, but it can miss a lot.
Watch for things like hesitation, frustration, or even small facial expressions. These moments tell you more about where people get stuck and what needs to be fixed than words ever could.
Verbal feedback is not always reliable and accurate. Humans experience some degree of social pressure while providing feedback, and sometimes we just can’t put words to what we are feeling.
Principle 4. Make usability the priority
Visualize, analyze, and materialize to maximize usability.
Usability has to come first. It’s not just about looking good. Your product must be easy to use.
If users can’t figure things out quickly, they’ll leave.
Focus on things like clear navigation, fast loading times, and a smooth experience so people can get what they need without any hassle.
The 5 usability metrics to focus on are:
Discoverability - The learnability of the UI
Speed and loading time - The efficiency of the tool/tech stack
Visual clarity - The ease with which you can use the tool
Responsiveness - The time the tech stack takes to complete a user action
User satisfaction - Through a CSAT/NPS or a feedback survey
The end result should be a tech stack that requires low user effort and produces high performance.
What are the key challenges to consider when creating a UCD process?
As with all things being built, there are challenges to consider. For the UCD process, those include:
Balancing user needs with business goals: Make sure prioritizing user satisfaction aligns with meeting business objectives like deadlines, budgets, and feature requests.
Gathering accurate user feedback: Feedback always has context with it and users don’t always articulate that. Observing behavior and interpreting non-verbal cues is crucial.
Managing complexity: As products grow, keeping the design simple and intuitive becomes harder. Strive to reduce complexity while still providing full functionality.
Iterating based on feedback: The UCD process requires continuous testing and iteration. Teams must be flexible and ready to pivot.
Maintaining alignment across teams: With different teams involved (design, development, marketing), keeping everyone aligned with user-centered goals can be a challenge. Misalignment can lead to inconsistent experiences.
Scaling the UCD process: As a product evolves, scaling the UCD process to accommodate more features and a broader user base without losing focus on usability is a significant hurdle.
How to structure a successful UCD process.
As with most things, there is no one way to rule them all with structuring a successful UCD process. However, we have found these phases to be a really good working model:
Research and identify your target persona
Investigating a target user persona helps developers understand what they’re building and for whom. It also streamlines the design process by narrowing down the product strategy.
The above image really highlights the target persona within a user-centered design according to ResearchGate.
Steps to building a user persona
Developing a user persona for a product is a qualitative, quantitative, and generative (brainstorming) effort. To being, create a template like this one:
User persona template by bibb
Then use the Requirements Engineering Methods to extract the user persona:
VoC Interviews: Use Voice-of-customer interviews for a deeper understanding of product usage and user behavior
Focus groups: Gather and examine qualitative information from end users and practitioners in the industry
Online surveys - This cost-effective tool allows you to gain a lot of valuable insights into your user persona
User tests - User testing is a qualitative research method to help gather insights on how potential end users use your site/tech, and what they see are the strengths and shortcomings of your product.
Define and specify design requirements
With the target persona in hand, it’s time to define, prioritize and get approval for the specified requirements.
Defining the requirements comes from the user persona.
Prioritizing requirements is done by categorizing them into functional and non-functional requirements. Below is a breakdown of how we go about this categorization.
Functional vs. Non-functional Requirements
User journey mapping
User journey mapping is an elaborate process. It involves::
Requirements gathering
Requirements engineering and categorization
Create user story maps for each function/feature
Create Epic stories
Write user stories
Define story-level tasks
Make a list of your requirements. Categorize them as functional and non-functional and map a user story for each function/feature.
A user story map shows the several possibilities of a user's interactions with your product. Note that a user story focuses on non-functional requirements like the user experience. Whereas conventional requirements focus on core functionality.
Example of a user story from Propelrr
User story templates are a great option to understand the importance of a feature to your end users. For example:
As a [type of user], I want to [perform task-A] so that I can [achieve goal-GA].
Once you’ve created user stories for each of the features/functions, it’s time to group the user stories into epics.
Agile developers use epics to assemble related user stories into a broader category. The epic story template shown below helps you capture epics and user stories in one place.
Example of epic user story template by Atlassian.
To better understand the epic story consider the following example..
Embrace Global is an Economist Innovation company that manufactures low-cost, portable infant warmers that replace traditional and expensive incubators for premature babies. Assuming that their end goal is to reduce the heating time of the warmer, here’s a breakdwon:
Goal: Reduce the heating time of the warming device
Epic story: Optimize the time the heater takes to heat up
User story 1: Experiment and calibrate the auto-thermistor against various temperatures
User story 2 : Engineer the microprocessor code for different temperatures
User story 3: Debug and optimize the heating time
Task 1: Clock the time it takes to heat up the aluminum heater
Task 2: Clock the time it takes to heat up the heating wax packet to the desired temperature
Task 3: Clock the time it takes for the wax to come down to the room temperature
User journey mapping is a process of bringing all of the above processes together to have an overview of the tool’s capabilities.
Test, evaluate, iterate
The goal of this phase is to test if the product is primed for real users.
“Usability testing is all about getting real people to interact with a website, app, or other product you've built and observing their behavior and reactions to it.” - Hotjar
Testing and evaluation is the process of organized calibration of the performance and functions. We conduct a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the test results in this phase.
First, choose your testing methods. Some common usability testing methods include:
VoC Interviews
Focus groups
Online surveys
Task Analysis
Heuristic evaluation
Eye-tracking and cursor-tracking heatmaps
From the test results, validate your product design against these 3 crucial design parameters:
Is the tech stack design accessible?
Is the tech stack design easily usable?
Is the tech stack functionality easily discoverable?
Consider utilizing low-fidelity prototyping in this process. Low-fidelity prototyping is an effective usability testing method to measure the user-centeredness of the design. This is an opportunity to understand if the users:
Know how your product works ✅
Are able to navigate through the product without feeling stuck ✅
Are able to complete the tasks they needed to ✅
Are able to use the product without technical roadblocks like system errors or bugs ✅
Find the tool easy to use ✅
Find the tool fast and responsive ✅
Once you complete a phase of testing against the above parameters, rebuild and repeat the set of instructions until the desired criteria are met.
Put your users first and make a product that sticks
The principles of user-centered design, such as empathy, iterative design, and feedback, ensure that the end product is not only functional but also usable and enjoyable for users.
By adopting user-centered design processes, businesses can increase customer satisfaction, reduce costs associated with rework, and create products that have a competitive edge in the market. But to build unique products, you need the best strategists, product managers, UX designers, and engineers.
You are not alone. At DevSquad, we specialize in building user-centered products that are intuitive, scalable, and aligned with your business goals. Our team of experts—from product strategists to UX designers and developers—works closely with you to deeply understand your users, eliminate usability roadblocks, and continuously refine your product based on real feedback. We don’t just follow orders; we help you design solutions that solve real problems, drive adoption, and keep users engaged, ensuring your product is built for long-term success.
Looking for a highly-skilled team of product design experts? Learn more about our product strategy and design.
