The Usability Professional Association defines User-Centered Design as “an approach to design that grounds the process in information about the people who will use the product. UCD processes focus on users through the planning, design and development of a product."
For me, it's easier to understand this concept by comparing it to another concept we've employed (but maybe not referred to it as such), which is user-driven design.
What’s the distinction between user-centered design and user-driven design?
In user-driven design, the user is actually in the driver’s seat and could be telling us any number of things including: what they want, how they want it, what they need, what they are trying to do, what they want at the moment, what they think they need, what they would "wish" to have.
In user-centered design, we as professionals are driving, but what guides us on our trip is understanding the fundamental and foundational needs of the user, i.e. where they want to end up, what they need to do along the way (their tasks) and what they need in order to make the trip (their requirements). And then we use our experience, expertise and understanding of the roads to get them there.
REAL EXAMPLE #1: Let's say a customer calls us and says, "Do you have an app for the IPAD for this high school textbook?"
In user-centered design, we would respond to the customer, "Tell me, what are you trying to do?” The customer may respond with, “I want to be able to read this text on the IPAD.” “AHH! No problem,” we say, “The digital text is already set up to work on the IPAD so you have everything you need.”
In the user-driven design scenario, we may have gone ahead and created the app---even though technically it wouldn’t have changed their experience of being able to read the book. If fact, what we would have created, they wouldn't have used because it wasn't necessary for what they told us they were actually trying to do.
What's striking to me about this example is that being user-centered actually allows us to serve customers more thoroughly because we are seeking to understand the root task they are trying to accomplish. By approaching it this way, it also allows us to spend our resources on creating those products/services that get at the core of what our customers are trying to do and how go about using something.
We always, always, always want to be gathering insight from the users of our products, our customers. It is always valuable! But we need to know how to interpret what we are hearing and how to arrive at the most fundamental level of “what are they trying to do?”
REAL EXAMPLE #2: When we revised The Catholic Youth Bible, we had to choose between creating the Bible with brown or black type on the inside. So we asked some different classes of students/teachers to view a fifteen page sample of the Bible in each of the colors and to let us know which one they would want to read. The response we received was "BROWN!” We released the Bible with brown type and we heard from users "This brown type is really hard to read". Yikes!
Looking back, I think the team working on the project did due diligence in terms of trying to include the customer in the process as best we could based on what we knew at the time. Today, we might have approached it differently. We may not have let the user’s choice determine or drive the decision, but we might have instead utilized other usability tools, such as eye-tracking software that could help us to observe the users actually reading in both of these color types and thereby get at how the color was affecting the users’ ability to read the words as well as their overall satisfaction of the reading experience.
These are great examples of the difference between user-driven design and user-centered design and why we always want to “ground” our design of a product in what the user—our customer—is trying to do.
To learn more on these topics:
Another article on User-Centered vs. User-Driven
Eye-tracking, Scrolling and Attention
Where to get affordable eye-tracking software
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