User centred design (UCD) is an approach that considers the user as the central point of any design process. UCD projects traditionally implied a preliminary study of users to collect their needs and requirements: a lot of efforts were made to understand users’ expectations, behaviours, frustrations, problems and generally the research approaches involved interviews, ethnographic studies, questionnaires, surveys, or focus groups.
Collected data would then be analysed by experts who would eventually come up with user requirements: a list of issues that designers should take into consideration during their design and implementation phase.