Human-Centered Design

Philosophy of human centered Design says

“When you understand the people you’re trying to reach—and then design
from their perspective—not only will you arrive at unexpected answers, but
you’ll come up with ideas that they’ll embrace.” – Ideo

What is HCD?
Human-centered design (HCD) is an approach to problem solving, commonly used in design
and management frameworks that develops solutions to problems by involving the human
perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process.
Embracing human-centered design means believing that all problems, even the seemingly
intractable ones like poverty, gender equality, and clean water, are solvable. Moreover, it means
believing that the people who face those problems every day are the ones who hold the key to
their answer. Human-centered design offers problem solvers of any stripe a chance to design
with communities, to deeply understand the people they’re looking to serve, to dream up scores
of ideas, and to create innovative new solutions rooted in people’s actual needs.
“Steve Jobs once asserted, “True innovation comes from recognizing an unmet need
and designing a creative way to fill it.” While he may not have been specifically referring to
human centered design, you’d be forgiven for making the assumption. After all, the purpose of
human centered design is to create innovative products, services and solutions through creative
and collaborative practices.”

First HCD practicing organization:

From designing the first manufacturable mouse for Apple to advancing the practice of human-
centered design, IDEO has long been at the forefront of creating change through design. At
IDEO, they have used human-centered design for decades to create products, services,
experiences, and social enterprises that have been adopted and embraced because they have
kept people’s lives and desires at the core.

Human-centered designers are doers, tinkerers, crafters, and builders.

The HCD process:
Human-centered design isn’t a perfectly linear process, and each project invariably has its own
contours and character. But no matter what kind of design challenge you’ve got, you’ll move
through three main phases: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation.

INSPIRATION
In this phase, you’ll learn how to better understand people. You’ll observe their lives, hear their
hopes and desires, and get smart on your challenge.
In the first stage of design, your goal is to understand your customers on a more human level.
Before you head out into the field, frame your design challenge. Clearly articulate the problem
you’re trying to solve, without being too narrow or too broad. This is an important step, as it
helps you define your scope, organize your thinking, and start out on the right foot. Then, create
a project plan and build your team. Think through your timeline, key milestones, budget, and
staffing. Build a cross-disciplinary team that combines technical know-how and industry
expertise with new ideas and fresh perspectives. You may be surprised by how much an
unexpected team member, like a graphic designer, has to contribute.

● Secondary Research:Reading up on the latest news, recent innovations, and existing

solutions will help you get smart on your design challenge.
● Interviews: Preferably in natural settings.
● Group Interviews.
● Immersion: This involves immersing yourself in the lives of your customers and
shadowing them in their own environments.
● Ethnographic Studies & Contextual Observations
● Focus Groups
● Surveys
● Diary Studies
● Participatory Design Activities
● Data Mining
IDEATION
Here you’ll make sense of everything that you’ve heard, generate tons of ideas, identify
opportunities for design, and test and refine your solutions. In the Ideation phase you’ll share
what you’ve learned with your team, make sense of a vast amount of data, and identify
opportunities for design. You’ll generate lots of ideas, some of which you’ll keep, and others
which you’ll discard. You’ll get tangible results by building rough prototypes of your ideas, then
you’ll share them with the people from whom you’ve learned and get their feedback. You’ll keep
iterating, refining, and building until you’re ready to get your solution out into the world
● Brainstorming possible solutions generates as many ideas as possible. To make sense
of your data, it can be helpful to create frameworks to visually represent the information,
highlight relationships, and guide your strategy.
● A framework could be anything from a 2×2 matrix to a journey map. Bundle similar ideas
into groups to identify emerging themes that will ultimately inform your design principles.
● Feedback on your concept will help you determine what to prototype in order to answer
your most burning questions and inform your next iteration. Try storyboarding, role-
playing, rapid-prototyping, or business model canvasing to view prototyping in a new
light.

IMPLEMENTATION
Now it is a chance to bring your solution to life. You’ll figure out how to get your idea to market
and how to maximize its impact in the world.
● Some startups find it helpful to begin with live prototyping, or running their solution for a
couple weeks in the real world.
● Conduct a resource assessment to determine if you have the capabilities you need to
realistically execute your plan.
● Build partnerships to access the capital and resources necessary to get their product to
market.
● Create a pitch to communicate your product to funders, partners, consumers, and the
marketplace. Explain how it works, why it matters, and who stands to benefit from it.
● Finally, monitor how you’re doing so you can evaluate your total impact over time.
 Human-centered design is uniquely situated to arrive at solutions that are desirable, feasible,
and viable. By starting with humans, their hopes, fears, and needs, we quickly uncover what’s
most desirable. But that’s only one lens through which we look at our solutions. Once we’ve
determined a range of solutions that could appeal to the community we’re looking to serve, we
then start to home in on what is technically feasible to actually implement and how to make the
solution financially viable.

Mindset of Human Centered Designers:

● Creative Confidence

Creative confidence is the notion that you have big ideas, and that you have the
ability to act on them. —David Kelley, Founder, IDEO
Creative confidence is the quality that human centered designers rely on when it comes to
making leaps, trusting their intuition, and chasing solutions that they haven’t totally figured out
yet. It’s the belief that you can and will come up with creative solutions to big problems and the
confidence that all it takes is rolling up your sleeves and diving in. Creative confidence will drive
you to make things, to test them out, to get it wrong, and to keep on rolling, secure in the
knowledge that you’ll get where you need to go and that you’re bound to innovate along the
way.

● Make it!
As human-centered designers, we make because we believe in the power of tangibility. And we
know that making an idea real reveals so much that mere theory cannot. When the goal is to get
impactful solutions out into the world, you can’t live in abstractions. You have to make them real.

● Learn from failure

Failure is an incredibly powerful tool for learning. Designing experiments, prototypes, and
interactions and testing them is at the heart of human-centered design. So is an understanding
that not all of them are going to work. As we seek to solve big problems, we’re bound to fail. But
if we adopt the right mindset, we’ll inevitably learn something from that failure.

● Empathy!
Empathy is the capacity to step into other people’s shoes, to understand their lives, and start to
solve problems from their perspectives. Human Centered design is premised on empathy, on
the idea that the people you’re designing for are your roadmap to innovative solutions. All you
have to do is empathize, understand them, and bring them along with you in the design process.

● Optimism
Human-centered designers are persistently focused on what could be, not the countless
obstacles that may get in the way. Constraints are inevitable, and often they push designers
toward unexpected solutions. But it’s our core animating belief—that every problem is solvable
—that shows just how deeply optimistic human-centered designers are.

● Iterate, Iterate, Iterate

As human-centered designers, we adopt an iterative approach to solving problems because it
makes feedback from the people we’re designing a critical part of how a solution evolves. By
continually iterating, refining, and improving our work, we put ourselves in a place where we’ll
have more ideas, try a variety of approaches, unlock our creativity, and arrive more quickly at
successful solutions.

Design Thinking by Tim Brown HBR ARTICLE:

Thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services,
processes—and even strategy -Tim Brown

● Thomas Edison created the electric lightbulb and then wrapped an entire industry
around it. The lightbulb is most often thought of as his signature invention, but Edison
understood that the bulb was little more than a parlor trick without a system of electric
power generation and transmission to make it truly useful. So he created that, too.
Edison’s approach was an early example of what is now called “design thinking”.
● In his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory he surrounded himself with gifted tinkerers,
improvisers, and experimenters. Indeed, he broke the mold of the “lone genius inventor”
by creating a team-based approach to innovation.
● Historically, design has been treated as a downstream step in the development process
where designers, who have played no earlier role in the substantive work of innovation,
come along and put a beautiful wrapper around the idea.
● Tangible Prototype: IDEO helped a group of surgeons develop a new device for sinus
surgery. As the surgeons described the ideal physical characteristics of the instrument,
one of the designers grabbed a whiteboard marker, a film canister, and a clothespin and
taped them together. “Do you mean like this?” he asked. With his rudimentary prototype
in hand, the surgeons were able to be much more precise about what the ultimate
design should accomplish.
● Many of the world’s most successful brands create breakthrough ideas that are inspired
by a deep understanding of consumers’ lives and use the principles of design to
innovate and build value.

Human-centered Design Examples Extracted from HBR articles.

Colgate Toothbrush

Colgate-Palmolive’s toothbrush, Acti-Brush, was innovative in the 1990’s, but since then,
competitor’s toothbrushes have surpassed Colgate’s on the market. Colgate-Palmolive hired
Altitude, a design consulting firm focused on human-centered designs, to create a new
toothbrush model.

The Altitude team extensively researched the audience, and then developed the Motion, a new,
slimmer, high-powered toothbrush with oscillating heads and an arcing neck. The entire product,
from superficial features to performance, centered around one critical question: will this serve
our user’s needs? Ultimately, the Motion was successful by solving a user’s problem -- needing
a slender toothbrush that could still deliver on performance -- the industry hadn’t previously
addressed.

IKEA

One way Ikea researchers get around this is by taking a firsthand look at themselves. The
company frequently does home visits and in a practice that blends research with reality TV will
even send an anthropologist to live in a volunteer’s abode. Ikea recently put up cameras in
people’s homes in Stockholm, Milan, New York, and Shenzhen, China, to better understand
how people use their sofas. What did they learn? “They do all kinds of things except sitting and
watching TV,” Ydholm says. The Ikea sleuths found that in Shenzhen, most of the subjects sat
on the floor using the sofas as a backrest. “I can tell you seriously we for sure have not
designed our sofas according to people sitting on the floor and using a sofa like that,” says
Ydholm.

IBM

IBM Design Thinking is the company’s in-house innovation lab that is helping companies tackle
their challenges by innovating and creating human-centered solutions that will elevate the
customer experience. IBM Design Thinking has 30 studio spaces allocated for design thinking
where people get together, put up lots of post-it notes on whiteboards, and collaborate on
various ideas.
THE DIAMOND MODEL

The Diamond Model is an approach to decision making that pairs two types of thinking,
divergent and convergent thinking, in order to allow individuals and teams to make effective
choices from an expanded understanding of the challenge and possible solutions.

Divergent Thinking

During the divergent phase, individuals/teams work to collect as much information as possible
about the given prompt. In this phase any filtering or selectivity is minimized (if done at all) the
objective is to acquire as many insights or possibilities as can be.

Convergent Thinking

In the convergent phase, individuals and teams work towards decisions for their prompt by
examining the information gathered in the divergent phase and prioritizing, organizing and
eliminating information/options based on their objectives.

Emergent Thinking

The Diamond Model includes a third form of thinking, emergent thinking, which occurs towards
the end of the divergent phase–after a variety of insights/possibilities have been gathered–and
into the beginning of the convergent phase. During this period, individuals/teams begin to
explore different ways to organize and examine what they’ve gathered. This exploration may
cause them to arrive at new insights or possibilities that they can add to their collection
(divergence), or it may cause them to merge and combine insights (convergence).
User-centered design vs. human-centered design

“What is the difference between user-centered design and human-centered design?” This is a
fairly common question among product designers. Both user-centered design and human-
centered design have the same goal—focus on the needs of the person who will use the
product and design the best possible experience for them. However, there is also a difference
between the two.

As was mentioned by William Hudson, the word “user” in “user-centered design” can make
people sound like a component in a system, dehumanizing the design process. User-centered
design tends to focus on splitting an audience into different segments and how they will use the
product. The segmentation can be based on the user group’s age (millennials, users in their
30s, etc.), geographic location, how much they are paying/what tier they have registered for in a
product, and more. On the other hand, human-centered design focuses on a user’s emotions
and feelings as they interact with a product, and this helps bring empathy to the product design
process.