| Sumario: | This article reports that during the past 15 years, the human-computer interaction community developed a large variety of user-centered design (UCD) techniques. However, these methods are still underused and difficult to understand by software development teams and organizations. This is because these techniques have been developed independently from the software engineering community, which has its own techniques and tools for managing the software development life cycle, including usability concerns. Historically, UCD has been described as the opposite of the system-driven philosophy generally used in engineering. Unfortunately, even if software development teams largely recognize their appropriateness and powerfulness, UCD techniques remain the province of visionaries, isolated usability departments, enlightened software practitioners, and large organizations, rather than the everyday practice of software developers. One obstacle to the wider practice of UCD is that its structure and techniques are still relatively unknown, underused, difficult to master and essentially inaccessible to common developers and small and medium-sized software development teams.
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