Topics

There is no one specific User-centred Design methodology, just a number of approaches to it. This topic has examined the first two stages of our approach to UCD, and in doing so has introduced general principles of UCD and some of the techniques that are used by practitioners. These include contextual enquiry, scenario generation and user environment design. You have read about and practised these techniques, but there are many others. HCI is to a great extent simply a set of approaches to and techniques for designing user-centred interactive computer systems. For this reason there are many perspectives on HCI. Other key approaches to UCD are considered in the topic on Methodologies for UCD, but you will find that they all have much in common with our approach.

In the next topic we will consider how a UED can be turned into a user-interface design.