User-Centered Design for Information Professionals

Abstract

Most information professionals would agree that user-centered design makes an important contribution to high quality information systems. However, there is no general agreement about how to define the term user-centered design, or how best to implement user-centered design strategies in the development of systems and services. This paper describes a wide range of meanings associated with user-centered design in information studies and in other cognate disciplines, and argues for a more coherent and widely accepted definition. It proposes that a general definition of user-centered design drawn from the literature of human-computer interaction (HCI) could serve as a basic framework for system design and support interdisciplinary work. It also describes some useful methods of implementing this framework in the development of user-centered information systems.