Humane interface

These are in my opinion the most important requisites for great design solutions:

1. Create a list of activity-centered requirements and test any design solution against each of them

2. Prototype the solutions you wish to implement before you create them

3. Test with real users throughout the design and development lifecycle, following an iterative process

These three ingredients are foundamental and without any of them, getting to a good solution can be very difficult if not impossible.

Now some considerations:

• Activity-centered requirements: what I mean here is something very close to scenarios, but actually the extended and wordy description used in the case of scenarios is not always required and achievable, so I am using a different wording. Activity-centered requirements are rarely used as a designed tool the way they should be. While personas are very popular, and practically not very useful for a number of reasons, scenarios as activity-centered criterias for the evaluation of the design solution are undoubtedly underestimated. Most organizations have  priorities, often related to marketing campaigns and business requirements, that keep away from the real needs of the end users and the way tasks are expected to be achieved in a specific context of use. The result is a design solution that fails to target key features that people would find useful to have or does not allow to achieve tasks the way it should happen in a real situation.
• Testing has become a common practice, but having seen many usability testing sessions being performed by different companies, I noticed how far these session can be from a real user experience scenario, and therefore, how misleading usability testing can be most of the times.