Understanding the ‘human’ in Human-Centered Design

Design thinking, Agile, Scrum. Recently these buzzwords have started to get thrown around a lot, not just in the design & tech industry, but also in parallel industries like Research, Media & Advertising. 

What does it all mean and where do these frameworks and methodologies fit into effectively creating a usable and market-ready product or service with human needs at its core?

As one of the lead organizers of the OpenIDEO Sydney Chapter, we facilitate design thinking workshops with the Sydney Community every month with the key outcome of having a social impact. To throw some light on OpenIDEO, it is IDEO’s open innovation platform supported by a global community who work together to design solutions for the world’s biggest challenges using the techniques of human-centered design (i.e. Design Thinking). These challenges run the gamut from finding solutions to food wastage to female empowerment to re-designing the fiber cup.

I prefer using the term ‘human-centered design’ as opposed to ‘design thinking’ purely because the former is self-explanatory and descriptive of the overarching aim of the methodology, to design something that is based on observed human needs. ‘Observed’ being the key word here. Traditional qualitative research techniques like focus groups and in-depth interviews need to be accompanied by ‘pure’ observation of people in the context they would use the product or service in question.

The ‘aha’ moments of inspiration often comes when we least expect it, when we get out of our conference rooms, out into the real world, and put ourselves quite literally in the feet of people we are designing for (i.e. practice empathy).

At its core, human-centered design (HCD) is an iterative process in which we put people (i.e. humans) at the heart of the design process to understand their key pain points and design products, services or experiences as a solution. We then put that solution in the hands of people to understand if it meets their needs and continuously iterate on that solution based on LIVE feedback.
Considering the pace at which the world is changing, and the current reality where technology is often obsolete before it even hits the market, it is crucial to adopt this iterative mindset where you get feedback from ‘your people’ (I shy away from using the word consumer) in the early stages of the process.
In the end, if you aren’t always designing to meet the needs of people, your product or service can quickly become irrelevant to the present reality.
There are several iterations of what constitutes the steps in HCD but to summarise it in the simplest way possible: the three phases of human-centered design are essentially:

1. Discovery
2. Ideation
3. Prototyping

In actual experience, these stages are far from being sequential. Therefore, what we assume will be a linear process is actually quite organic and deliberately inefficient. Which brings me to one of the most crucial mindsets we need to adopt as human-centered designers. To embrace ambiguity. 

In fact, in their book, Creative Confidence, Tom & David Kelley talk about going with the flow in the face of the unknown in order to give yourself the opportunity to be surprised, have your initial assumptions questioned and develop creative ideas.

In this 3-part series, I will explore each of the phases of HCD in more detail and outline my key learnings in taking teams through the process of human-centered design grounded in a pressing human need.