User Needs Analysis and requirements engineering: Theory and practice

The rapid advancement of AI technology has led to increasingly complex and opaque systems, creating a critical need for explainable AI (XAI) that enhances transparency and user trust. Despite extensive research on XAI methods and applications, the user-centered design (UCD) process for XAI remains fragmented and unclear. This systematic review analyzes 27 studies from 2020 to 2024 to develop a comprehensive framework for user-centered XAI system design (UCXAISD). We identify five key stages: contextual inquiry, explanation needs identification, XAI method selection, user interface design, and evaluation and refinement. Our framework aligns with traditional UCD processes while incorporating specialized elements for XAI, including user-centricity, transparency, and actionability. For each stage, we provide evidence-based guidelines derived from the literature. The framework serves as a blueprint for developing XAI systems that balance technical sophistication with user needs.

User-centered requirements engineering in health information systems: A study in the hemophilia field

This paper presents two case studies that suggest how to adapt Scrum for user-centered design (UCD) focused industrial projects and how to work with UCD in Scrum software development teams. The objective of the paper is to share insights gained from running such combined projects in industry in order to help others avoid some of the pitfalls associated with this way of working. There has been much published in this area within the research community. However, our work presents both perspectives: adapting a UCD way of working towards a Scrum way of working; and adapting Scrum for running projects from a UCD perspective. We explore the impact Scrum had on team members’ work-practices during a project life-cycle and what lessons were learned from our experiences.

This paper discusses results from a research study in the design and implementation of information documents and products in the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). It presents a composite ethnographic and case study analysis of user-centred information design practices at the ATO from 2001-2005, and shows that the ATO has been an active proponent of user centred design practices in developing business information documents and products for an extended period of time, while also identifying potential opportunities to improve business simulation, design and product construction. The article highlights that user-centred design principles may have broad based application in both the public and private sectors.

This study presents a content control application usage on smartphones which can improve collaboration between children and parents. The importance of the parents' role is to provide a comprehension regarding the content of the application to children will make good communications between parents and children. So, the children can think and make decisions on something that they face. Parental control application is made to control and limit the use of applications on smartphones by children. But the existing application has a problem on the user interface. They designed just only show the same features that the application block by the parents and are not designed to involve children in the process of selecting applications. Thus, the chance of parents to help children understand the contents of the application could possibly be missed. Because the user interface is closely related to the tasks performed by users, the user interface has a role in a parental control application design. To build a good parental control application, it is necessary convenience when a user interacts with the application system. This is a consideration in this study that focused on the user interface. Design methods that will be used in designing the user interface is User Centered Design (UCD). UCD is a method in designing user interface design with a focus on what the user needs. This method will help research to provide user data that parents and children directly, so the search process more accurate data is obtained. UCD has a life cycle stage design, so the design is made to be better. The result of this research is obtained parental control application user interfaces that provide children's freedom in choosing the content of applications and needs of parents in educating children regarding the content of the application being used so parents can educate a child.

This study aims to explore how to achieve innovative design for intangible cultural heritage (ICH) tourism products through User-Centered Design (UCD) theory and the cultural gene approach. Using the national ICH of Mianzhu New Year Pictures as a case study, the research, guided by UCD theory, conducts an in-depth analysis of user needs, with a detailed investigation into users' aesthetic preferences and functional requirements to ensure that the design meets modern market demands. Additionally, the cultural gene approach provides theoretical support for extracting and transforming the core cultural symbols of Mianzhu New Year Pictures, allowing these symbols to be effectively integrated into contemporary products through symbolic design. This approach ensures that the design retains the cultural characteristics of Mianzhu New Year Pictures while enhancing users' cultural identity and overall experience. This study employs a mixed research methodology, with a primary focus on design experimentation, supported by KANO-AHP, ethnographic fieldwork, and iterative testing to analyze user needs and optimize the product. Initially, KANO-AHP is used to conduct a quantitative analysis of user requirements, identifying priorities in functionality, aesthetics, and emotional appeal to provide precise guidelines for product design. Next, ethnographic fieldwork is conducted through observation and interviews to gain deep insights into the cultural background, artistic features, and user contexts of intangible cultural heritage, enabling the extraction of representative cultural gene elements. Finally, the study employs design experimentation for multiple rounds of user testing and product iteration, incorporating feedback from focus groups to progressively enhance the product’s functionality and aesthetic appeal, thereby increasing practicality and user satisfaction. This comprehensive experimental approach allows the researcher to dynamically adjust the product based on real-time feedback, ensuring continuous improvement in actual applications while effectively integrating cultural heritage with modern user needs. The results of the study show that the combination of UCD and cultural genetics methodology can effectively enhance the market attractiveness and cultural heritage value of NRM products. This study not only promotes the application of UCD and cultural gene method in the design of non-heritage products and provides practical guidance for the modernisation and innovation of non-heritage products, but also opens up a new way of thinking for the inheritance and development of non-heritage culture in modern society.

This article describes the application of user-centered design (UCD) principles to an existing product line in a focused attempt to reshape customers' attitudes about individual product offerings as well as the product brand as a whole. Examples of user research, design development, and validation are given to demonstrate the challenges of applying participatory design principles, and the methods used by the ThinkPad(r) UCD team to overcome those challenges. Special attention was given in three areas. First, the organizational design, or macro-UCD aspect of a successful product design effort is analyzed. Second, a mobile computer frustrations research project is reviewed as the baseline for the ThinkPad UCD effort. To address the frustrations, 4 UCD initiatives were conceived as part of a product-line redesign: a product line simplification based on common building blocks, a common user interface and aesthetic design language, a battery and power management improvement, and an intelligent user assistance architecture. Results are discussed in terms of improved brand equity, customer satisfaction, marketshare, and product cost savings. Key learning is discussed in terms of the success of the product realized through UCD as well as specific user engineering approaches that proved successful when applied to a mature commercial electronics product line.

This paper reports on an experimental study on user interface design in complex electronics manufacturing systems to measure the difference between ecological interface design (EID) and user-centered design (UCD). Based on cognitive psychology and human factors theory, we conducted a comparative research study. Prototypes of the interface were designed based on the EID and UCD which were undergoing NASA-TLX to evaluation the subjective workload of the users. The main findings of this study were as follows: (1) we found that the ecological interface design and user-centered design had significant differences in each levels; (2) the ecological interface design has a significant better effect on subjective workload compare to user-centered design in the complex electronics manufacturing systems (P < 0.05). The research results can help interface designers to deeply understand the difference between EID and UCD, which could guide the design of user interface in the complex industrial scenarios.

Abstract: In the current digital era, transportation booking applications have become an integral part of people's daily lives. One of the preferred applications is the Suroboyo Bus Booking Application (GOBIS). GOBIS is a platform dedicated specifically to accessing Suroboyo Bus transportation services. However, with the advancement of technology and changing user needs, the GOBIS application also needs to be adjusted to remain relevant and meet expectations. Many users have complained about the application's ambiguous interface, unclear colors, and other issues. Therefore, a redesign of this application is necessary. This study employs the User-Centered Design (UCD) method and SUS testing to obtain a new design that can be implemented. The results show a significant improvement in application usability, with the average SUS score from users after the redesign process reaching 82.25, rated as "good" with a "B" grade. Comparing it to the usability score of the previous version, which only reached 57.25 with a "poor" rating and a "D" grade, indicates a substantial improvement. Thus, the new design demonstrates a significant improvement in usability compared to the previous version. Keywords: redesign; GOBIS aplication; user interface; UCD; system usability scale Abstrak: Dalam era digital saat ini, aplikasi pemesanan transportasi telah menjadi bagian tak terpisahkan dari kehidupan sehari-hari masyarakat. Salah satu pilihan utama yang sering digunakan adalah Aplikasi Golek Bis (GOBIS) Suroboyo Bus. GOBIS dirancang khusus sebagai platform untuk mengakses moda transportasi Suroboyo Bus. Namun, sejalan dengan kemajuan teknologi dan evolusi kebutuhan pengguna, perlu penyesuaian agar aplikasi Golek Bis tetap relevan dan memuaskan pengguna. Banyak pengguna mengeluhkan tentang antarmuka aplikasi yang kurang jelas, warna yang ambigu, dan masalah lainnya. Oleh karena itu, perlu dilakukan redesain aplikasi ini. Penelitian ini menerapkan metode UCD dan mengujikan SUS untuk mendapatkan desain baru yang lebih baik. Hasilnya menunjukkan peningkatan yang signifikan dalam kegunaan aplikasi, dengan nilai rata-rata skor SUS pengguna setelah proses redesain mencapai 82.25, dinilai sebagai "good" dengan peringkat "B". Perbandingannya dengan nilai kegunaan versi sebelumnya yang hanya mencapai 57.25 dengan penilaian "poor" dan peringkat "D" menunjukkan peningkatan yang signifikan. Oleh karena itu, desain baru menunjukkan perbaikan yang berarti dalam hal kegunaan dibandingkan dengan versi sebelumnya. Kata kunci: redesign; aplikasi GOBIS; user interface; UCD; system usability scale

Scientific applications built on wide-area distributed systems such as emerging cloud based architectures and the legacy grid computing infrastructure often struggle with user adoption even though they succeed from a systems research perspective. This paper examines the coupling of user-centered design processes with modern distributed systems. Further in this paper, we describe approaches for conceptualizing a product that solves a recognized need: to develop a data gateway to serve the data management and research needs of experimentalists of electron microscopes and similar shared scientific instruments in the context of a research service laboratory. The purpose of the data gateway is to provide secure, controlled access to data generated from a wide range of scientific instruments. From the functional perspective, we focus on the basic processing of raw data that underlies the lab’s business processes, the movement of data from the laboratory to central access and archival storage points, and the distribution of data to respective authorized users. Through the gateway interface, users will be able to share the instrument data with collaborators or copy it to remote storage servers. Basic pipelines for extracting additional metadata (through a pluggable parser framework) will be enabled. The core contribution described in this paper, building on the aforementioned distributed data management capabilities, is the adoption of user-centered design processes for developing the scientific user interface. We describe the user-centered design methodology for exploring user needs, iteratively testing the design, learning from user experiences, and adapting what we learn to improve design and capabilities. We further conclude that user-centered design is, in turn, best enabled by an adaptable distributed systems framework. A key challenge to implementing a user-centered design is to have design tools closely linked with a software system architecture that can evolve over time while providing a highly available data gateway. A key contribution of this paper is to share the insights from crafting such an evolvable design-build-evaluate-deploy architecture and plans for iterative development and deployment.

In the era of Covid-19, people are more sensitive to their health and hygiene. SAC is present in the community as a service to clean each customer’s favourite shoes. Even though SAC has been around since 2013, until now they have not touched the digital realm. For this reason, innovation for SAC needs to be implemented so they are not left behind by competitors who are starting to become aware of digitalization. So that the implementation of digitalization can save costs and time, the approach to making digital products is through product development. To innovate through the use of product development in digital, a User-Centered Design (UCD) method approach with a Design Thinking (DT) mindset is used. The UCD process includes understanding context, specify user requirements, design solution, and evaluate. With the DT mindset, the process of emphatizing, defining, and ideation is applied to the understand context and specify user requirements so that this research will understand the usability side for users. With the addition of 5 UCD elements from Jesse James Garret, the digitalization process will be more in-depth and detailed in terms of creating interface design solutions. Primary data will be collected through In-depth Interview resulting abundant data that create persona and Minimum Viable Product(MVP). This research aims to analyze and identify the user experience flow for the prototype mobile web app product design SAC with the identifying the MVP and design prototype mobile website application and later do some usability testing to getting result that can meet the needs and uses for SAC customers. The result of this design approach method is a high-fidelity mobile web app prototype which was evaluated using Usability Testing (UT). The persona of each customer and the desire are the first key in development. Strong framework is formed with information architecture, low-fidelity, and high-fidelity prototypes. The final stage of the UCD iteration is to evaluate Usability Testing with a binary task success rate of 90%. Another UT results of quantitative data analysis with the Single Ease Question (SEQ) showed the number 6.42 and the System Usability Scale (SUS) showed the number 87.5 with quality A.

The present manuscript-based doctoral thesis addresses the question of how approaches to interaction design can be made more structured. This is an attempt to make it more transparent how one can come to a final design of a user interface starting from the results of foundational user research. The results of this analysis can help designers to work very systematic at times, to better reflect on their own idiosyncratic design process “on the job”, or to learn interaction design in the first place. In user-centered design (UCD) there are lifecycles and methods that already provide a certain degree of structuring with the discrimination of different phases etc. But they leave open some gaps here and there. This work is an attempt to close some of the gaps and bring closer together these individual methods. Interaction design patterns are a way to describe solutions to problems in designing user in-terfaces in a very systematic way. However, pattern libraries usually are far from complete. They mostly lack patterns to support the early phases of interaction design and therefore they do usually not link to the abstract models of conceptual design. The third manuscript describes an organizational scheme for interaction design patterns to support the process of implementing a complete pattern language covering all the different levels of the solution domain. The scheme has been found by analyzing several established UCD lifecycles and it has been evaluated by organizing all the individual patterns of several public pattern libraries into it. The first manuscript describes a process of systematically building up a pattern language alongside of a redesign project of a complex application in a corporate environment. The second manuscript describes how patterns have been evaluated in the aforementioned project, when there were several different solutions for one problem. This is shown with two interaction design patterns for the problem of making required input fields visible to users. The fourth manuscript is an attempt to bring together the idea of a complete pattern language, as a description of the solution domain of interaction design, with the different parts of the problem domain. Therefore, the same UCD lifecycles (as in the third manuscript) have been analyzed to find a universal structure of the problem domain. Then all the mappings between the individual parts of the two domains have been described in order to link the two domains in this direct way. Another way of looking at the gap between the problem domain and the solution domain is by seeing it as a distance of levels of abstraction between results of foundational user research and the final user interface. From this point of view a bridging of the gap can be seen in different intermediate representations (abstract models, sketches, and prototypes) and linking them together in a coherent way. These different ways of bridging the gap between foundational user research and the final design of a user interface can be seen as cognitive artifacts to foster problem solving and learning of interaction designers.

User-Centered Design (UCD) focuses on deeply understanding the needs of users and ensuring these needs are met by tools and software. UCD methodology aims to make tools easier to use, reduce time spent in development and the need for user support, as well as make it easier to create and maintain documentation. The goal of UCD is to ultimately make a tool that meets user needs and is a pleasure to use. This workshop will give an overview of UCD and several examples of how UCD practices are already being used at several institutions. Attendees will leave with ideas of how to incorporate UCD into their tool development as well as general resources to get started.

— User interface is a term used to describe the appearance of a computer or equipment that the user interacts with. User experience isn't just what consumers see; This can not only provide a design that appeals to the eye, but can also explain why the design is the way it is, a design that can make users feel comfortable when achieving their goals when utilizing the services provided by websites and applications. The purpose of this study is to find out whether the user centered design approach has a positive impact on the analysis and design of user interface and user experience on the Inspire Portal of Sam Ratulangi University.. Researchers have received the final results, namely, the mean value in the attractiveness aspect which was initially -1.61 the value became 0.71, for the second aspect, namely perspicuity (clarity) the initial value -1.72 rose to 0.68, and for the next aspect, namely the third efficiency value before improvement -1.67 to 0.61, and the fourth aspect dependability (accuracy) value before improvement -1.64 and after improvement the value became 0.67, The fifth aspect is stimulation before the improvement of the mean value of -1.64 after improvement to 0.58 and for the last aspect, namely novelty before improvement the value is -1.69 and after improvement the value becomes 0.64. The measurement tool in this study uses a user experience questionnaire, and for the final results of the benchmark comparison there are four aspects that are below average, namely attractiveness, efficiency, stimulation, and novelty. Key words — UNSRAT INSPIRE Portal; User Centered Design Methods; User Experience; User Experience Questionnaire; User Interface. Abstrak — User interface adalah istilah yang digunakan untuk menggambarkan tampilan komputer atau peralatan yang berinteraksi dengan pengguna. Pengalaman pengguna bukan hanya apa yang dilihat konsumen; Ini tidak hanya dapat memberikan desain yang menarik bagi mata, tetapi juga dapat menjelaskan mengapa desainnya seperti itu, desain yang dapat membuat pengguna merasa nyaman ketika mencapai tujuan mereka ketika memanfaatkan layanan yang disediakan oleh situs web dan aplikasi. Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui apakah pendekatan user centered design memberikan dampak positif terhadap analisis dan desain user interface dan user experience pada Portal Inspire Universitas Sam Ratulangi. Peneliti telah menerima hasil akhir yaitu, nilai mean pada aspek attractiveness (daya tarik) yang awalnya -1.61 nilainya menjadi 0.71, untuk aspek yang kedua yaitu perspicuity (kejelasan) nilai awalnya -1.72 naik menjadi 0.68, serta untuk aspek berikutnya yaitu yang ketiga efficiency (efisiensi) nilai sebelum perbaikan -1.67 menjadi 0.61, dan aspek yang keempat dependability (ketepatan) nilai sebelum perbaikan -1.64 dan setelah perbaikan nilainya menjadi 0.67, aspek yang kelima yaitu stimulation (stimulasi) sebelum dilakukan perbaikan nilai meannya -1.64 setelah dilakukan perbaikan menjadi 0.58 dan untuk aspek yang terakhir yaitu novelty (kebaruan) sebelum perbaikan nilainya -1.69 dan setelah dilakukan perbaikan nilainya menjadi 0.64. Alat pengukuran dalam penelitian ini menggunakan user experience questionnaire, dan untuk hasil akhir dari comparison benchmarknya ada empat aspek yang dibawah rata-rata yaitu attractiveness, efficiency, stimulation, dan novelty. Kata kunci — Antarmuka Pengguna; Kuisioner Pengalaman Pengguna; Metode Desain yang Berpusat pada Pengguna; Portal INSPIRE UNSRAT; Pengalaman Pengguna.

This study presents a case study of the integration of usability evaluation into the development of task based information system prototypes in undergraduate software engineering course projects within a problem-based learning (PBL) approach. As part of the course, usability evaluation was integrated into the software development process, and the usability evaluation performance (UEP) of the projects was assessed in terms of the following criteria: effectiveness, efficiency and problem validity. It also analyzed the problem solution rate of the projects and their correlation between UEP criteria. Additionally, the study in-depth analyzed the students' final conclusions regarding the design process. The relationship between UEP criteria and the problem solving rate was examined using Spearman correlation analysis. In addition, final conclusions and problem solving behaviors were analyzed through document and thematic analysis techniques. The results supported that there is a significant correlation between usability evaluation criteria and problem solving rate. The main themes that emerged regarding usability problem solving behaviors were navigation design, error handling, database connection, algorithm design, search matching, system-user communication design and others. Final conclusions showed that project teams gained valuable insights into user-centered design, solved critical usability problems and improved their prototype design. It can be concluded that the integration of usability into software engineering education using the above approach contributes to students' understanding of user-centered interaction design.