CCD Design
- User Requirements
- Involving & Engaging with Users
- Accessibility
- Environmental Ergonomics
- Psychology of the Built Environment
- 3D Human Modelling
Involving & Engaging with Users
As a design develops, a user-centered design approach requires the continuing involvement and engagement with the end users. This provides the design process with a number of benefits - firstly, it utilises the expert views of the end user who know and understand their job. Secondly, it gets their buy-in and commitment to the design solution that emerges - this is particularly important in projects with political or staff sensitivity. Together these can deliver better design.
What do we do?
We use a range of approaches and methods to involve users in the design process. Firstly, we always plan for a series of design workshops and reviews where design work is presented and discussed in an open forum. We support these workshops through the use of drawings, 3D visualisations and models.
The second approach, of particular value for complex workspaces such as control rooms, is the use of the full scale mock-up trial. In this exercise we build a full size model of the furniture and room usually in cardboard or MDF. We then run a number of interactive design workshops with end users to help refine and develop the design. The materials used allow for quick and easy adaptation of the design through the sessions. Where team interactions are of particular importance we often use the mock-up trial as a simulation exercise (see the Underground control room case study for an example).
We like to run design projects having formed a user group from a representative group of staff from the client organisation. This allows the continued involvement of staff as well as a mechanism for the group to feedback progress to the wider staff body.
The input and engagement of the end user in our design process is of total importance to us.
>> see some examples of projects that have closely involved user groups