Recommendations for a user-centered design strategy

Applies to this Power Platform Well-Architected Experience Optimization checklist recommendation:

This guide describes the recommendations for user-centered design to ensure your workloads are useful, usable, and desirable for users, while meeting business requirements. User-centered design is an approach to design that focuses on understanding the needs, preferences, and context of the users who interact with the workload. Employing user-centered design can help to avoid usability problems, user frustration, and dissatisfaction. It can also help to reduce the costs and risks of design failures, redesigns, and maintenance.

Key design strategies

Putting users at the center of your workload development is key to ensuring optimal user experiences. Strive to understand what users need and expect from the workload. Perform research and synthesize the research into artifacts that you can use to plan and communicate the design with users and stakeholders. Continuously improve the experiences with testing and iteration.

Involve workload users throughout the lifecycle

Workload teams should not only research and understand the needs, goals, and preferences of the users, but also involve them in the process of creating solutions that meet those needs.

To include users in the lifecycle, consider these strategies:

• Conduct user research at the early stages of the workload development cycle, to identify user problems, opportunities, and requirements.
• Co-create and co-design with users, by inviting them to participate in brainstorming sessions, workshops, and design sprints, and encourage them to share their ideas, feedback, and opinions.
• Prototype and test with users, by creating low-fidelity or high-fidelity prototypes of the proposed solutions, and testing them with your users to validate the assumptions, hypotheses, and design decisions.
• Launch and iterate with users, by releasing the minimum viable product (MVP) or the beta version of the workload to a subset of your users. Collect their feedback and usage data to measure the impact and performance of the workload, and make improvements based on the findings.

Conduct user research and share the insights

Conducting user research for a well-architected workload is an essential step in understanding user needs, preferences, and behaviors to inform design decisions effectively. User research can be performed using various methods, such as interviews, surveys, observations, usability testing, and analytics. User research helps to define the problem space, identify user segments and personas, and create user scenarios and journeys.

• Clearly define the objectives of the research: Ensure that the objectives align with the overall project goals and desired outcomes for the workload, as well as the expectations of the users and stakeholders.

• Select the research methods: Use a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods—interviews, surveys, observations, usability tests, and card sorting—to gather data from users, and analyze their goals, tasks, pain points, and expectations. Choose the preferred methods based on research objectives and available resources. A well-defined research plan outlines the approach, methodology, timeline, and logistics, while also preparing necessary materials such as interview guides, survey questions, or usability test scenarios.

• Conduct the research: Aim to include individuals who represent the target audience with diversity in contexts, skills, and experience. During research sessions, maintain a neutral and non-leading approach to gather unbiased insights. Collect qualitative and quantitative data during these sessions, and capture user feedback, observations, and interactions with the solution.

• Analyze findings: Identify patterns, themes, and insights that emerge from the research analysis. Employ techniques such as thematic coding or affinity mapping to organize and interpret the data effectively. Use key insights extracted from the research findings to inform design decisions and address user needs, pain points, and preferences.

• Communicate the findings: Document the research findings, insights, and recommendations in a clear and actionable format. Share the research findings with stakeholders, users, and other relevant parties to foster understanding and to justify the design decisions based on the user research.

Empathize with users and their contexts

Empathizing with users and their contexts helps the workload team to understand user needs, problems, expectations, and motivations, and to design experiences that are relevant, useful, usable, and desirable. Empathy with your users also helps to avoid making assumptions or biases about your users' behaviors, preferences, or values, and identifies insights and opportunities that might otherwise be overlooked or ignored.

Create user personas to synthesize the research data into fictional but realistic profiles of the target users. These profiles should describe your users' characteristics, goals, needs, pain points, motivations, and behaviors. Base your user personas on evidence and data, not assumptions or stereotypes, and make sure they reflect the diversity and complexity of the user population. Include relevant quotes, stories, or scenarios to illustrate your users' contexts and experiences. Employ users personas to guide design decisions and to evaluate the workload from the user perspective.

Create scenarios to describe the situations or tasks that the user personas encounter or perform, in relation to the workload. Scenarios should capture the users' goals, actions, emotions, and expectations, as well as the challenges or barriers they face, and the outcomes they achieve. Ensure scenarios are realistic and specific and reflect your users' context and environments. In general, use scenarios to explore user needs and requirements and to identify opportunities and gaps for design improvement.

Create journey maps to visualize the user personas' end-to-end experience with the workload, across different touchpoints, channels, and stages. Aim to illustrate the user journey from initial problem or need, to final goal or satisfaction, and highlight the users' thoughts, feelings, and pain points along the way. Include your users' actions, interactions, and feedback, as well as the workload's features, functions, and performance. The goal of journey maps is to empathize with your users' experiences, and to discover their pain points and opportunities for design enhancement.

Empathizing with users and their contexts also helps to build trust and rapport with users, and further ensures their involvement in, and contribution to, the design process.

Encourage continuous improvement

Embrace a culture of continuous improvement by soliciting feedback, conducting regular evaluations, and incorporating lessons learned into future projects. Stay updated with the latest trends in UX (user experience) design from authorities invested in the latest trends and research. Look to modern Microsoft product interface implementation for inspiration and latest trends in the Fluent UI space. Continuous improvement ensures that your designs evolve alongside changing user needs and industry trends, thus maintaining relevance and effectiveness over time.

Iterate and improve solutions by testing the workload. Testing should involve observing and measuring user behaviors, reactions, feedback, and satisfaction, as well as the workload's usability, functionality, and quality. Use an iterative approach that may include different methods and tools to suit the stage and scope of the design process, such as prototypes, surveys, interviews, analytics, or usability tests. Testing should evaluate the workload's performance and value, and validate or invalidate the design assumptions and hypotheses.

Analyze and synthesize the test results by organizing, interpreting, and presenting the data and insights that were collected from the testing phase. Identify the patterns, trends, and themes that emerge from the data, and draw conclusions and implications for design decisions and solutions. Compare and contrast test results with initial user needs and requirements to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the workload. With analysis and synthesis, the goal is to generate actionable recommendations and suggestions for design improvement and refinement.

Implement and communicate the design improvements by applying the changes and modifications that were suggested by the test results and analysis, and by documenting and sharing the design process and outcomes with the relevant stakeholders. Update and improve the workload based on the user feedback and data, to ensure the workload meets user expectations and goals. Create and deliver design artifacts and deliverables that demonstrate the design solutions and rationale, such as wireframes, mockups, prototypes, and specifications. Implementation and communication should be used to finalize and launch the workload and to showcase the design value and impact.

Power Platform facilitation

If your workload includes a copilot, you can analyze performance and usage in Copilot Studio: Copilot Analytics provides a comprehensive overview of your copilot's performance. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify which topics are having the greatest impact on escalation rate, abandon rate, and resolution rate. Tracking conversation engagement rates and outcomes is essential for measuring copilot performance metrics and discovering areas for improvement.

Experience Optimization checklist

Refer to the complete set of recommendations.