User-Centered Design

Chapter 4. Having a Plan

“Goals are dreams with deadlines.”

—Diana Scharf Hunt

When our team began to implement user-centered design practices at the hospital, it became apparent that we needed a plan. We couldn’t say we were going to start putting users first and then just go about our business. We needed to have documentation, from beginning to end, that would help us complete the entire process correctly.

We also needed to communicate our vision for what we were trying to achieve. Not just to the hospital but to ourselves: What was our purpose? Overall, what did we want to achieve as a team? How did we provide value to our users and the organization?

We decided that a template was needed to help us fill in the blanks and effectively walk through the user-centered design process.

Building line-of-business applications for an organization requires that you wear many hats. One minute you’re building an application to help the human resources department manage their employees and the next you’re developing something to assist the finance department with their invoices. By having a template to revisit, our team is able to keep all of our projects headed in the same direction.

For the nonenterprise developer, it’s equally important to have a plan in place before you start writing code. You should also spend time thinking about what you’re trying to achieve with your applications, even if you’re building them just for fun.

Essentially, having and documenting a strategic plan ensures that you’re ...