The user centred design process not only helps designers to analyse and foresee how users are likely to use a product, but also to assess their assumptions about people’s behaviour in realistic tests with actual users. Such testing is necessary as it’s often very difficult for designers to understand intuitively what a first-time user of their design will experience, and what each user’s learning curve may look like.

The chief difference from other design philosophies is that user centred design tries to optimise the design around how users can, want or need to use the product, rather than forcing them to change their behaviour to accommodate the product.

You can test ideas out through a process called iterative design. It’s an approach that involves the refinement of the design of a product, system or process through cycles of building, testing and analysing a sequence of prototypes. It is very compatible with user centred design, as prototypes are excellent for communicating a developing design idea to users and may also be tested out with the users themselves. The user centred design process is therefore based on iterative design.