Why Human-Centered Design Should Guide the Design Process

A key question that keeps coming up in design circles is whether design is an art or a science. A quick search on the web will bring up hundreds of articles and blog posts debating this topic.

The debate is pointless and leaves out a fundamental question: Why are we designing? We don’t design because it looks cool, or because it’s fun and exciting. We design because we want to improve lives in some way. The goal of design, then, is not to make things look pretty or be sleek. The goal of design is to solve problems for the people who use our products and services.

The importance of design comes from its ability to empathize with users and see things from their perspectives. This requires an investment in research to really understand who users are, what they need, and why they want it. It also means observing how they behave rather than relying on self-reported claims.

Principles of Human-Centered Design

When you apply human-centered design to your product development process, you can get useful insights into what your customers need or want before you start building the product. These insights can be applied throughout the entire product development cycle — from conception to delivery. The result will be a product that solves real user needs and makes their lives better.

Here are four principles of human-centered design:

• Empathy: Be curious about people and challenge assumptions
• Definition: Reframe problems and discover root causes
• Ideation: Create ideas in brainstorming sessions by challenging assumptions and creating solutions through sketching and prototyping
• Testing: Build a realistic prototype of your solution to test with users

In the simplest terms, human-centered design (HCD) is a process that starts with the people you’re designing for and ends with new solutions that are tailor-made to suit their needs. Human-centered design is all about building a deep empathy with the people you’re designing for; generating tons of ideas; building a bunch of prototypes; sharing what you’ve made with the people you’re designing for; collecting their feedback, and finally putting your innovative new solution out in the world.

Human-Centered Design Techniques

Human-centered design is an iterative process in which knowledge about users is continually refined to ultimately inform the design of products or services that suit their needs, allowing users to perform better tasks. It has been used for developing everything from software applications to mass market consumer products like cars, televisions, refrigerators and mobile phones.

Technique 1: Affinity Mapping

Affinity mapping is a great tool for sifting through large volumes of data collected during research activities such as user interviews or observational studies. This technique can be applied throughout the human-centered design process — from framing initial research questions to identifying insights and developing solutions during ideation sessions.

The results of affinity mapping allow designers to see patterns and relationships between ideas or information so they can make decisions quickly. For example, conducting an affinity mapping exercise on customer complaints may reveal a common root cause that could lead to breakthrough innovation in your product or service offering.

Technique 2: Wireframing and Prototyping

Once you know what problems need to be solved, it’s time to start creating solutions. These solutions should meet the user’s needs and provide them with value. Wireframing and prototyping are two techniques that help designers quickly visualize ideas and test them out with users for feedback before committing to development.

There are many ways to accomplish wireframing and prototyping. You can get out pen and paper and sketch ideas, or even use post-it notes on a wall. If you have the skills to quickly create prototypes using applications like Sketch or Photoshop, this can be a great starting point for discussion with your team.

Prototyping is important because it helps you identify how a product will flow through different screens, as well as how each feature functions as part of a whole experience. The process of moving from idea to prototype is also helpful for identifying problems with the concept early on in the design process before any time or resources have been allocated to development.

Ideally, you’ll do this work before spending any money building features.

Technique 3: Usability Testing

This technique helps you get rid of any design flaws in your product and improve its overall quality. It doesn’t tell you how good the design is but it does help you to improve it.

A great way to discover usability problems is to watch people using your service or product. By watching them, you can find out what they like and what they don’t. You can also observe where they get stuck or confused and alter your design to make it better.

You can do this by inviting a group of people over to use your product in a controlled environment where you can observe them in action. You then ask them questions about their experience while they use your product or service to find out what they liked or didn’t like about it, which parts were confusing and how the experience could be improved.

Usability testing can be extremely valuable because it often reveals problems that you might not have noticed when designing a product or service. It’s also a great way to catch design flaws before they are developed into an expensive prototype or even worse, into a finished product that has already been launched on the market.

Final Word

Successful businesses are those that create products and services that are relevant to their customers. The world’s most successful products solve big problems in people’s lives. If a business wants to innovate, it must first understand its audience – who they are, what they need, and what they value.

Human-Centered Design gives organizations the tools and a framework to do exactly this. By understanding their customers’ needs and behaviors, companies can start building better products or services – ones that are more likely to succeed because they’re designed specifically with users in mind.