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Table 3 Benefits and challenges associated with UCD methods

From: Harmonizing evidence-based practice, implementation context, and implementation strategies with user-centered design: a case example in young adult cancer care

Method

Description

Benefits

Challenges

Usability testing

Products or services are evaluated by testing them among potential users. Participants must represent real users and the researcher watches them complete representative tasks.

• Identifies usability and usefulness issues with EBP at any point in the development

• Provides valuable source data for design team prototyping workshops

• Can be done with a small number of participants

• Making decisions about who counts as a user and which individuals represent users more broadly

• Prioritizing divergent feedback from different user groups

• Requires multiple iterations to use it effectively

Ethnographic contextual inquiry

Contextual inquiry: in-depth data on a few carefully selected individuals informs a fuller understanding of users and their context.

Ethnography: immersive analytic descriptions of behaviors that characterize and distinguish groups, including the knowledge and beliefs that generate and help interpret those behaviors.

• Elicits in-depth data on users, their tasks, and their context

• Particularly helpful for understanding the multilevel, non-rational, or difficult-to-quantify contextual processes influencing implementation and sustainment

• Sheds light on the differences between what people say and what people do

• Provides valuable source data for design team prototyping workshops

• Can be time-intensive

• Large amounts of data generated can be cumbersome to analyze and interpret

• Requires the researcher to be nimble as they move through the participant’s context without being overly intrusive

• Participants must be sampled carefully so as not to sacrifice all breadth of information for depth

• Can position the researcher in difficult or emotionally charged situations, bringing us face-to-face with the hardships faced by the populations we study

Design team prototyping workshop

A multidisciplinary group of prospective users and other stakeholders convene to generate design solutions based on project data (e.g., usability testing and contextual inquiry data).

• Engages users in analysis to promote a shared understanding of the context

• Provides platform and methods (e.g., translation tables, storyboards, personas, scenario of use) for translating contextual data into EBP adaptations, context modifications, and implementation strategies

• Builds buy-in among prospective users

• Presenting project data in a way that is digestible to design team members

• Weighing the importance of user feedback with the feasibility of design solutions

• Inexpert application of UCD methods may lead to “feature creep,” in which new ideas are incorporated into the EBP without careful consideration and evaluation of the effects of the added features