How do you make software user-centered?

As a global company, we are dedicated to building region-specific software and focus on smart car features and automated driving functions that meet the needs of our customers in every region. We are building dedicated software with real-time 3D content and an enriched user interface (UI) for automated driving functions incl. lane-level view and navigate with the most popular local mapping solution.

The users often don't even know what they want. As a result, a lot of up-front analysis (à la Waterfall) may not suffice in understanding their needs. It's better to take a Lean startup approach. Develop and release a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) first. An MVP is the minimum features or functionality you can develop to produce a usable solution to get early feedback from your users. It'll allow you to test your and your users' assumptions about what they want early on. You can then evolve the MVP over the course of Agile iterations. Ideally, each iteration should add a new feature to the MVP. This iterative and incremental approach will help you continuously test your understanding of your users.

The perfect environment for practicing your skills in making user-centered software is the internal projects. No surveys, you just meet with your users and work with them. 1) Discovery meeting: learn their goals and pain points, and ask them what they could see as a solution. 2) Engineering: architect the solution yourself/with your Team. Put your engineering hat on, what could go wrong, validations, edge cases... This phase will produce a lot of questions. 3) Decisions meeting: go back to the users with the questions. UX, flow, ergonomic usage (easy). Edge cases, and validations (hard, help them by preparing multiple options). The end result is usually that you nail it in version 1, plus the users are really really happy.

I think there isn′t a to need talk about this subject. If the user is not in the center of everything, nothing should be done. My main concern is related to the architecture of patterns (and I love patterns and especially clean architecture); as I have seen, many software engineers made the user "swallow" software with a beautiful but non-functional front end. And often even difficult to use in everyday life. That is, the focus goes to technology and purism in application development and takes the user out of the center.

Understand users ,a very important and first step in becoming a customer centric company ,Using various machine learning methodologies and experimenting with the outcome of machine learning projects ,gives us insight on which features are most demanding and for which region

Sadly when the user is not in the center of design; you end up having to start over while dealing with unsatisfied customers.

If you follow Agile and include your users in your ceremonies, you'll have a good cadence of their involvement. For example, you can include them in iteration (sprint) planning, backlog refinement, and the iteration review/demo meetings.

The earlier we involve users for feedback, the better it is. The intent should be to collaborate with the user while building software. As one develops functionality, it should be reviewed with users for refinement. Based on review feedback, changes can be made along the development process. An early change is way better (read cheaper) than a late one.

You can also make your software open source and release it often. Users can provide feedback on your changes and you can adjust quickly in response to that feedback.

Navigation, telephony and media, are the most important functionalities for our customers and are therefore always at the centre of the screen of the vehicles. More than 20 other functions are automatically offered as individual modules at the top layer using artificial intelligence to determine if they are relevant for the customer. This “Zero Layer” offers a personalised and intuitive user experience, with all relevant functions always in view. The best thing is that it’s all done situationally, context-based and adapted to the customer's individual habits.

Could include some discussion on architectural design decisions to decouple user interface development from other stack layers. E.g. Model View Controller design pattern.

Our regional R&D hubs around the world focus on dedicated parts of the development, like advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) or the infotainment system, working closely with Germany to integrate software into the latest hardware in the Electric Software Hub . This requires a large international agile workforce with a global mindset continuously working together to exceed our customers’ needs and desires, no matter where they are.

To develop features fast and scalable ,we need to have a complete road map of what we want to develop and breakdown those into small deliverables for each release and have Plan for validation , different teams are involved in creating the feature, it's very improvement to align with each development team what we wants to deliver in each sprint and over communicate the deliverables for each sprint /Release

Communicating with user is needed for product developments, puzzle is how to communicate with users? there are multiple ways that provides an options to interact with customers. Marketing/Sales person interacting with customer, Telecalling, Letters and emails, these are traditional ways which gets tedious in digital era. The transformation in enacting is far more important than acting at convenience. So, in this era it is important for customer to collaborate with manufacturers for the best and most sustainable products. How user can collaborate with customers? Use social media platforms to provide your reviews on technology, usability and sustainability. Allow customer to access product usage data but not personal data.

We have been offering over-the-air (OTA) updates since 2013, giving our customers the opportunity to upgrade their vehicles with the latest software, whenever and wherever they want. We collect anonymised usage data to continuously optimise the performance of the systems and develop valuable new features that make driving a Mercedes-Benz even more pleasant for all our customers.

As a pre-sales engineer, I bridge the commercial and technical worlds, offering a unique opportunity to understand users' expectations firsthand. This direct insight helps save R&D time and focuses on specific use cases that yield prompt results for users and organizations.

Maintaining continuous and transparent communication with your clients is absolutely essential. While it's true that clients may not always have a clear idea of their needs, it's crucial to establish an ongoing feedback process. This allows you to gauge what's effective, identify areas in need of improvement, and recognize aspects that may have added no value or even detracted from it. By keeping this feedback loop open, you're undoubtedly on the right path to crafting something truly exceptional.

I've found learning from users through data analysis is a fundamental aspect of user-centered software development. Gathering and analyzing user data to gain insights into their behaviors, preferences, and needs, can then inform decision-making and improvements in the software. Here are some guidelines below; Collect Data: Gather user actions and feedback. Gain Insights: Analyze this data for trends and preferences. Inform Decisions: Use insights to enhance the platform. Prioritize Improvements: Focus on what users value most. Iterate Continuously: Keep refining based on data and feedback. This data-driven, iterative approach ensures that software remains user-centered, engaging, and satisfying.

In the world of software development, user feedback is the gold standard. As developers, we strive to create the best possible software solutions. We meticulously plan, code and test, aiming to cover all scenarios. But here's the catch: there's always a user out there who can surprise us with their creativity and unique use cases! That's the beauty of user-centered software - it adapts, evolves, and grows with its users. No matter how robust we make it, there's always room for improvement, and that's where user feedback shines. Users bring diverse perspectives, fresh insights, and invaluable experiences. They are the ones who discover innovative ways to utilize our creations that we may have never envisioned.

“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” Steve Jobs

There are a couple of points I think that are missed here. It is essential that the engineers understand what the customers are actually trying to do and why they need to do it. As much as possible this means enabling them to talk to and more importantly listen to the customers. I assert that virtually no great product has been built where this isn’t true and all the methodologies in the world do not obviate the need for this. Software is the negotiation between the possible and the desirable. Engineers understand the former deeply. Focus groups are deeply misleading here in my experience. They produce a user interface that tries to reach rather than to turn the software into a pencil of the mInd. As such it is noisy and irritating.

Empathy is the number one trait in order to build software that users would love. It’s really important for the full team to be able to put themselves in the shoes of the users. Not just the PM or designer, but it’s also important for all the engineers. There are so many small technical decisions made on a daily basis. Understanding the users will ensure they are going to be right decisions.

The second point is that products become addictive not when they constantly teach you how to use them (this is actually infuriating) but when they are so efficiently designed that they feel effortless to use because everything you do frequently is just a keystroke or click or two away. A great deal of the traditional advice (focus groups, user journeys) if handled unwisely leads to a cluttered busy user interface that optimizes teaching you and is anything but subliminal. Such an interface (as Excel discovered before the toolbar) becomes more and more irritating to use and makes the product less and less delightful. But to get this right you have to believe customers will use it frequently and because it adds great value. It takes faith.

Be objective, sometimes suspicious about your users. They always want a specific thing, but your job is understanding *why* they want it and find the best way to deliver the same result through features that fit the most use cases as possible in a way that fits your product vision. Otherwise, when trying to make everyone happy, we often end up with cluttered UI, terrible UX and a backlog of bugs to address