Survey on the UCD integration in the industry

The primary contribution of this paper is investigating how the User Centered Design approach is integrated into the industry. Employing a structured web-survey, targeted to the usability practitioners, we find out that UCD is particularly employed in big companies, but with a relatively low ratio: practitioners represent less than one percent of the company employees. User interviews and both low and high fidelity prototyping are the most frequently used techniques. We eventually validate our hypothesis that UCD integration is facilitated by factors related to management support, infrastructure and communication; companies interested in producing better usable and fit-for-use products should take all of these issues into serious consideration.