Human-Centered Design

Have you ever thought about Human-Centered Design, what is it? And what are its phases, and why it is important? We will do our best to make you understand this aspect. Let’s begin to define the Human-Centered Design.

What is Human-Centered Design?

Human-Centered Design is a creative approach to resolve the problems which begin with users’ needs. It begins with the users; involves co-designing and collaboration; and allows you to build empathy with your users so that you’re more confident in your solutions.

The thing which makes Human-Centered Design different from other problem-solving approaches is focusing on users who use the products throughout their experiences. Look to the user when creating products, keeping them at the heart of the product development process.

So that you can create deep empathy with them, establish multiple ideas to solve their problems, and have a solution via rapid prototyping.

“The challenge is to use the principles of human-centered design to produce positive results, products that enhance lives and add to our pleasure and enjoyment. The goal is to produce a great product, one that is successful, and that customers love. It can be done.”

Don Norman, “Grand Old Man of User Experience”

Stud your users to identify as many problems as possible, and then narrow your focus on one of these problems. Determine many solutions as possible, then narrow your focus on one or two that you prototype and test.

A five-Step Approach to Human-Centered Design.

Empathize

“Empathize” is the start point of the Human-Centered Design. The following stages can be summarized as Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. In the empathize stage, your goal, as a designer, is to obtain an empathic understanding of the people you’re designing for and the problem you are trying to solve.

This phase involves observing, engaging, and empathizing with the users you are designing for to understand their experiences and motivations. As well as imagine yourself in their physical lives to have a deeper personal understanding of the problems, needs, and challenges involved.

Empathy is important to a Human-Centered Design process. And empathy helps designers to set aside their assumptions about the world to gain insight into their users and their problems. Depending on your time constraints, you will want to gather a substantial amount of data at this stage of the Human-Centered Design process.

In the empathize stage of a Human-Centered Design process; you will develop the empathy, understandings, experiences, insights, and observations which you will use to build the rest of your design project. So you should also provide consulting expert to find out more about the users you design for.

But you’ll be surprised at how much insight you and your team can easily obtain via practical Empathize ways.

Define

This is the phase in which you put yourself in your users’ lives to determine a better grasp of who they are. Detect and ask questions to discover things from their point of view. Know your biases and Assumptions because you can deviate from them if you don’t align with your users’ reality. Look at this as foundational research. First, you have to detect the right users.

Identify the user’s ages, ethnicity, technological expertise, and so on. Ensure that your sample is inclusive. Research in this phase could contain interviews or focus groups with users, and, when necessary, field experts. You can also make contextual inquiries and ethnographic research, diary studies, and photo journals, and use ways like the 5 whys to dig deeper.

All of this help you to have empathy with your users. When you get into their minds, put yourself in their shoes, and understand their lives, you open yourself up to more creative possibilities.

Ideate

Now that you’ve detected your users and made your research, the next step is to synthesize the data and makes sense of what you’ve learned in the Define phase. One of the most often used ways for synthesizing findings is affinity mapping.

Everybody writes their findings on individual sticky notes and then you group similar notes to detect themes. Following synthesis, you take your themes and insights and convert them into opportunities for design, brainstorming as many ideas as possible.

There’s no judgment during brainstorming. You can and should find as many ideas as you can, and they can be wild and crazy.

Prototype and test

After brainstorming, you will select the greatest ideas and develop prototypes. Prototypes are low-cost estimates of what your solution will look like, and they may take many forms, including paper sketches, role-playing, physical objects, and digital prototypes. Digital wireframes and prototypes can be created fast and easily with tools like IN Vision.

To gain feedback and determine the best path forward, It is essential to experiment with various prototypes and share them with your target audience. You repeat the process until you have a product that is ready to move ahead after you integrate the feedback and iterate on your prototype.

Implement

This is the stage during which you take your product to market and refine your business model. It’s critical to remember that your product is never finished. You should always improve, test, and gather feedback from users to ensure that your product is serving their changing needs. Check your pre-defined success metrics to see whether your product is meeting expectations.

The Human-Centered Design applies not just to the product itself, but also to how it is marketed and communicated. This is where your Define research comes in handy: You already know your users’ problems and expectations in their own words.

Why is Human-Centered Design important?

Human-Centered Design is an innovative method of issue resolution. It’s a process that starts with the users you’re developing for and concludes with fresh solutions that are tailored to their specific requirements.

Human-Centered Design involves cultivating deep empathy with the users you’re designing with, generating ideas, Creating a slew of prototypes, sharing what you’ve created together, and finally releasing your inventive new solution into the world.

When you develop deep empathy with the users you’re building for, it allows you to find solutions that will make their lives good.

The Human-Centered Design framework will also help your business discover new opportunities to diversify, by either developing new products for existing markets or defining new markets for existing products. When you’re directly connected to your users, you can align with their needs as they change.

A Human-Centered approach gives users a sense of understanding, which can increase customer loyalty. When they feel like they’re the important part of the process, the product becomes more meaningful to them, and they’re more invested in using it.

What is the difference between Human-Centered Design and Design Thinking ?

It’s hard to ignore all the talk about Human-Centered Design and Design Thinking. A quick google search of those terms Digging into those results, and the opinions on the topic might make your head spin. The fact is, there’s no one answer. There are endless answers. The most common explanation:

Design Thinking works on designing an object or process from scratch. But Human-Centered Design works to make an object or process that already exists (or is at least fully conceived) even better for users.

Design Thinking, as a mindset, ultimately enables creativity and out-of-the-box ideas that you would not have considered otherwise. HCD puts the human perspective at the center of every step of the process (whatever that process maybe).

Design Thinking enables Human-Centered Design. Design thinking is a way while HCD is a feature.

If you find a solution as a designer, you are applying Design Thinking. However, the solution may or may not be centered on human.

Design Thinking applies to any design problem, whereas Human-Centered Design is a process or philosophy of design that holds the human impacts and outcomes at its core in regards to decision-making, validation, and goals.

By definition, the idea of human/User-Centered Design is the belief that you should think about how someone wants to achieve their task instead of how you may be limited to how you make things or deliver a service. The two subjects are different but ultimately a collection of methods and ideals for attaining the same goal

Finally, I hope you know:

In this saturated digital environment where people have become challenging and very savvy. Applying Human-Centered Design is pretty much essential to obtain their trust quickly, ensure their loyalty and build brand awareness.

More and more personal and professional activities are being conducted online. And customers have come to expect an optimized, friction-free digital experience across all platforms and devices. When they visit a site or open an app, they only have seconds to engage them. First impressions are 94% design-related.

Human-Centered Design is about problem-solving, not solution implementation. It is also about outcomes, as these are measurable changes in consumer behavior that are the indicators of success and value.

The Human-Centered Design process makes sure that the right content, features, and functionality are existed in the right place, at the right time, in the right way, Providing optimum user experiences, effortless interaction, and ultimately, business benefits.

References:

• Interaction design foundation.
• IDEO’s Human-Centered Design Toolkit.
• UK Design Council’s Double Diamond.
• Stanford d.School, you can begin with Design Thinking.

Related posts:

• Why is Human-Centered Design more needed than before?
• What are Human-Centered Design principles?