I’ve published UCDmanager, a collaborative web tool aimed to manage and document User-Centered Design and usability techniques in an integrated manner:

Why do I think such a tool may be useful? Well, some weeks ago I published a questionnaire about the knowledge of UX and usability experts about different UCD techniques, and the tools they use to manage those techniques. The techniques were:

• user roles;
• personas;
• abstract use cases;
• prototyping;
• usability heuristic evaluation;
• usability thinking-aloud user testing;
• web accessibility evaluation;

It was just an informal study, without any statistical significance; anyway, I get 44 responses. The best-known and most-used techniques were prototyping and usability heuristic evaluation; other techniques are less used, but they are known by almost every expert.

What about tools? The question was:

How do you usually manage and document [those] UCD techniques?

And here are the results:

You see…  Templates (Word, Excel, etc.) are, by far, the most-used tool, followed by copying-and-pasting and CMS. But… where are the integrated, specialized tools to achieve a real, effective UCD? It seems there are no such tools or, at least, they are not used by the UX community. That’s why I’m working on UCDmanager, which not only supports the documentation of those techniques but also offers the possibility to integrate the techniques following this diagram:

So you are invited to join UCDmanager and start using it for your UX / usability projects. It’s a personal project, so any feedback will be really welcome.