Methods
This page highlights various product design and software development approaches. Portfolio projects demonstrate how we applied these methods and techniques to solve real-world problems.
Goal-Directed design (GDD)
‘Alan Cooper is known for his books About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design and The Inmates Are Running The Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. He is the founder of Cooper, a leading interaction design consultancy. He created Goal-Directed design methodology and pioneered using personas as practical interaction design tools to create high-tech products.’
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If you design for everyone, you delight no one. That is a recipe for a mediocre product.
The technique intends to understand the essence of users’ needs and behavior to eventually make a product whose interface and pursuit satisfy those requirements. Goal-Directed design shares similarities with User-Centered design but puts an emphasis on understanding the needs and goals of users to be used as the starting point for product design.
User-centered design (UCD)
‘User-centered design is an iterative process that focuses on understanding the users and their context in all stages of design and development. In user-centered design, designers use various investigative methods and tools (e.g., surveys and interviews) and generative ones (e.g., brainstorming) to develop an understanding of user needs. The term was coined in the 1970s. Later, cognitive science and user experience expert Don Norman adopted the term in his extensive work on improving what people experience in their use of items. The term rose in prominence thanks to works such as User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction (which Norman co-authored with Stephen W. Draper) and Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. The four phases in user-centered design include understanding the context of use, specifying user requirements, designing solutions, and evaluating these solutions against requirements.’
Recently, Norman stated he would now say People-Centered design.
Object-oriented UX (OOUX)
‘Object-Oriented UX offers a better way to break up complexity, allowing us to work iteratively and holistically. Instead of slicing up a system by verbs, OOUXers slice by nouns. As it turns out—this is how developers work too—object-orientedly. Leveraging the processes of OOUX, UX teams can collaborate more seamlessly with development teams. It's not only developers that are breaking up complex systems by objects. All humans think in objects—designers, end-users, and those who painted the caves of Chauvet. So, as we make our user experiences more object-oriented, we also make them more intuitive.’
