Discovery: The heart of Human-Centered Design (HCD)

This is part 1 in my 3-part series on using the techniques of human-centered design to solve a pressing problem. 

Remember when you were a child and you got excited by anything new? In the Discovery phase, we embrace this ‘fresh eyes’ perspective. We observe people's lives, hear their hopes & desires and explore new possibilities for design. Insights arising out of this phase are core to the HCD process as they are grounded in human needs.

The most fundamental mindset here is Empathy. By putting ourselves in the feet of those we are designing for we see the world through their eyes, understand their pain points & motivations. We use a range of research techniques like in-depth interviews, card sorting, photo journals, observations supported by targeted questions to uncover the human truth and the unmet need underlying that truth.

To illustrate this process, let me give an example of a project my teammates and I worked on. Our challenge was to come up with a solution to reduce food wastage in our local community (i.e. Sydney). To kick off the ‘Discovery phase’ we conducted initial desktop research and spoke to our own communities, family, friends and co-workers to get a deeper understanding of their daily routine, shopping habits and likelihood of wasting food.

Industry experts like the CEO & Founder of OzHarvest, Ronnie Kahn, enlightened us with attitudes underlying the issue of food wastage in Australia and the magnitude of the issue. We realised there were several organisations tackling what we called ‘organisational’ food wastage (e.g. food waste produced by restaurants, hotels & offices). But what about household food wastage?

We learnt that households in Australia throw a staggering $8 billion worth of edible food as waste every year. Moreover, in greater Sydney alone, households spent around $1,036 a year on food that is consequently wasted. This means for every 4 shopping bags bought by each shopper, 1 perfectly good shopping bag gets tossed out to the trash.

To dig deeper, we conducted observations and in-depth interviews with people across a wide spectrum (Young professionals, students, couples, families with kids). We visited the 3 major supermarkets in Sydney (Coles, Woolworths and ALDI) to observe shopper behaviour and spoke to them about their shopping habits.

These shopper intercepts were followed by a telephone interview and in-home ethnographies where people showed us how they stock their groceries and spoke about their meal planning attitudes.

Armed with heaps of qualitative findings, we built an empathy map to bring life to our learnings from consumer research. An empathy map is typically split into 4 quadrants: (What people are Saying, Thinking, Doing & most importantly how they are Feeling)

We uncovered key human insights contributing to the issue of food wastage: 

1.    Lack of accurate food planning: People tend to shop for groceries quite sporadically and weren’t making shopping lists before going shopping. This led them to purchase more than what they would realistically consume.

2. Over-estimating how much you will eat: As the popular saying goes, ‘your eyes are bigger than your stomach.’ In a social occasion (e.g. house parties, Chinese New Year celebrations) the ‘social price’ of not having ‘enough’ food was so high that people wanted to avoid that scenario at all costs. Not having enough food was tantamount to not being a good host/hostess.

3. Leftovers are unappealing: People start out with good intentions, but then become too busy to make use of all the fresh food they buy. There is a general cavalier attitude to fresh food, combined with a voracious appetite for takeaway food and eating out. The plethora of choices Sydney-Siders have at hand further motivates this behaviour.

4. Supermarkets don’t cater to the needs of young adult single-person households: Many staple products (e.g. bread, milk) are sold in large packs which are sometimes too much for 1-2 adults.

4. Different perceptions of ‘food freshness’: People had different ways of estimating how long fresh food lasts and their estimates were not always accurate. As a result, select items that were perfectly safe to eat were being trashed. There were several online resources addressing this problem of ‘lack of knowledge’ on food storage (e.g. Foodwise)

We then synthesised our findings using affinity mapping to highlight what people’s key pain points (fears, frustrations, obstacles) and gain points were (wants, needs, measures of success).

Going through this process helped us cluster common themes & prioritise insights that reflected the true reality of a grocery shopper in Sydney which consequently led to food wastage:

1.    Social & Work commitments takes precedence over grocery shopping/meal planning.

2.    People overestimate how much they can eat at one point in time.

3.    It is convenient to freeze leftovers but unappealing to re-use them.

These insights led us to craft opportunities for design in a format that IDEO popularised called ‘How-might-we….’.

More on that in Part 2: Ideation

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.