User-Centered Design for Research: Following Our Own Recommendations

The core idea of user-centered design is to understand your user and design a product accordingly: making it easy, fast and intuitive to understand. But we observe that scientists often forget these recommendations themselves: They write highly text-heavy papers, books and guidelines that do not meet their user’s (the designers) needs. Designers must design for their customers, so consistently researchers need to design research documentation for designers. In this paper we discuss the basic idea of user-centered design as well as corresponding methods and transfer them to the field of scientific research. Two industrial case studies clarify the application.     «

The core idea of user-centered design is to understand your user and design a product accordingly: making it easy, fast and intuitive to understand. But we observe that scientists often forget these recommendations themselves: They write highly text-heavy papers, books and guidelines that do not meet their user’s (the designers) needs. Designers must design for their customers, so consistently researchers need to design research documentation for designers. In this paper we discuss the basic ide...     »