User-centered design methods in practice: a survey of the state of the art

This paper reports the results of a recent survey involving over one hundred leading professionals of user-centered design (UCD). The survey covered a broad range of issues ranging from the profile of a typical UCD project including the percentage of total budget on UCD, organizational impact of UCD, measures of UCD success, and the most widely used methods and techniques. Results show that cost-benefit tradeoffs are a key consideration in the adoption of UCD methods. Measures of UCD effectiveness are lacking and rarely applied. There is a major discrepancy between the commonly cited measures and what were actually applied.