The Design of Everyday Things and StayShure's Discovery Process

In his book The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman argues that the best way to design products that are easy to use is to focus on the user's needs. Norman calls this approach "user-centred design." At StayShure, we love this approach and encourage our developers and FCTO’s to internalize the user-centred approach to custom software.

Custom Software that Cares About Users

User centered design requires deep understanding of what user's want. That’s why before we build custom software, StayShure works through an extensive discovery period with our clients to understand how the end user will experience the software. Throughout this discovery period, our FCTO’s help businesses to identify how their software should function and what problems it needs to solve from the user’s perspective. Some of the steps we work through include developing user stories and user flows and designing wireframes. We also like to build functional prototypes that demonstrate exactly what the final product will be like. We normally find that this process helps our clients experience how their users will use the app, and usually, it helps them reimagine how the product will work. Our FCTOs use the information gathered through the discovery process to design and develop custom software solutions that are easy to use–and, most importantly, put the user first.

Everyday Software:

Here are more ways that StayShure has aligned its discovery process with The Design of Everyday Things:

• Visibility of system status: The user must be able to see what is going on. The system should provide feedback about what it is doing. This feedback should be clear, unambiguous, and helpful. In our software development process, we seek to make our tools provide useful and relevant feedback so that users intuitively understand how to use the tool.
• Error prevention: The designer should make it easy for the user to do what he wants to do, and difficult for him to do what he shouldn't do. As developers, we make it very difficult for users to make mistakes or misuse the tools we build. This is why discovery is so important in the early stages of app development.
• Recognition rather than recall: People remember things best when they can recognize them. They remember things worst when they have to recall them from memory. One of our design principles is to use self-explanatory icons and minimalist interfaces that help our users know how to navigate our software without having to try.

Make Sure the Shoe Fits Before You Build It:

The Design of Everyday Things reminds us of how necessary it is for businesses to get into their user’s shoes and experience the software from the user’s perspective. At StayShure, we want to make sure the shoe fits before we build it!

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If you are looking for a partner who can help you develop easy-to-use and understand software, we encourage you to contact us.

• Learn more about our discovery process.
• Book a free consult with our CEO.
• Find out more about our FCTO service.

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