User-Centred Engineering

To set out a one-size-fits-all user-centred engineering procedure suitable for all of the many different situations you are likely to meet is, in our opinion, impossible. Similarly, it is not our aim to provide a recipe book, containing step-by-step instructions on how to apply user-centred techniques. The chapters which follow are instead intended to assist you in understanding how user-centred engineering can be applied during software and product development in practice, how key user-centred techniques actually operate, how they can be planned within your project and what points you need to watch out for. This chapter provides an overview of the relationship between various user-centred techniques and how they are integrated into common software development processes.