The Design of Sites: Ch. 4 — Involving Customers with Iterative Design
Chapter 4 of The Design of Sites. Covers the second pillar of Customer-Centered Design — keeping customers involved throughout design via Iterative Design — and its three constituent activities: setting goals and designing, Rapid Prototyping, and evaluating designs with real customers.
License: © 2006 Pearson Education / New Riders — all rights reserved, no open license; one of the book’s co-authors is a FuguUX founder, which is the basis for citing it here.
Key points
- Why iterate (Iterative Design): no design team has complete information about customer needs, and errors caught late in a project cost roughly 10x more to fix than if caught early, ballooning to 100–1000x after deployment. A 2x2 “right feature × right implementation” framework explains the distinct kinds of design mistakes iteration helps catch.
- Design goals and principles: goals (faster task completion, fewer errors, higher conversion, etc.) come from business/customer analysis (Know Your Customers); seven design principles, adapted from Shneiderman, Nielsen, and Tufte, guide how patterns get applied to reach those goals — covered in depth in Interface Design Principles.
- Rapid prototyping (Rapid Prototyping): site maps, storyboards, and schematics as early design artifacts; a fidelity spectrum from low-fi paper sketches through medium-fi to high-fi HTML mockups; horizontal (broad, shallow) vs. vertical (narrow, deep) prototypes; explicit advice to avoid computer-based design tools until structural issues are settled.
- Evaluation (Usability Evaluation Methods): three complementary techniques — expert/heuristic review, informal qualitative evaluation (think-aloud protocol, critical incidents), and formal quantitative usability studies (bottom-line data) — used in combination across the project lifecycle rather than as alternatives.
- The chapter explicitly frames itself as the second of two pillars of customer-centered design introduced in Chapter 3, closing the loop opened by Know Your Customers.