Human-centred design is a practical, repeatable problem-solving approach that focuses on putting customer needs first. In the context of a product, the human-centred design proposes that the customers who are facing the problem have the key to how the product can solve their problems.

Description

Human-centred design offers problem-solvers a chance to:

• Design with real customers,
• Deeply understand the people they are looking to serve,
• Discover new ideas, and
• Create innovative products planted in the customers' actual needs.

Key tenets of human-centred design include (as per the International  Standards Organization):

• Active involvement of the customer in the product lifecycle. In human- centred design, the practitioner and customer work together to cocreate the product offering.
• Iterative and non-linear approach. The journey of human-centred design is not completely sequential. The success depends on internalizing customer problems without the designer's bias.
• Experimentation and feedback drive the product roadmap. Human- centred design promotes product prototyping, starting from a most rudimentary form, to evolved techniques such as A/B tests to actively seek feedback from customers.
• Using adaptive processes. Creating a product that appeals to specific needs of different customers, rather than producing a mass market and templated set of features.

Human-centred design draws on a loosely defined process popularized by IDEO, a design and consulting firm, and contains three phases and toolkits intended to drive participation and feedback from the customers who will be using the product.

Components

To successfully apply human-centred design for product development consider:

• Mindset: To dive into human-centred design and guarantee a human focus. It typically includes:
  • Creative confidence: The notion that everyone has creative potential to solve problems given the right set of impetus, process, and tools.
  • Experiment: Ability to make something, test it with customers, and learn from it even though it fails.
  • Empathy: Understand deeply about customers in their environment and how they feel about the problem.
  • Embrace Ambiguity: Ability to be comfortable with not knowing the answer and to allow exploration.
  • Optimism: Having the belief that solutions exist for issues faced by customers and finding ways to move forward.
• Process: Typical human-centred design approaches follow:
  • Inspiration phase: Learning on the job, opening up to creative possibilities, and trusting that as long as practitioners remain rooted in the needs of the communities, ideas will evolve into the right solutions. Key activities include:
    • Framing the problem and building a plan to address important problems,
    • Building an interdisciplinary team to generate ideas, and
    • Conducting primary and secondary research about customers and their problems.
  • Ideation Phase: Practitioners share learnings with the product team, make sense of a vast amount of data, and identify opportunities for product design. This phase:
    • Involves generating an array of ideas, evaluating the ideas, and pursuing some of those ideas.
    • Focuses on creating tangible prototypes of the ideas and sharing them with stakeholders.
    • Involves iterating, refining, and building until the product follows a concrete set of ideas.
  • Implementation Phase: The solution is brought to customers. Practitioners build partnerships, refine the business model for the product, pilot the product, and stabilize it. It also includes evolving the product as customers' needs change.

Considerations for Human-Centred Design

Strengths

Limitations

The product evolves through human-centred design and has a better chance of success as it focuses on deep understanding of needs, without diving into the potential solution. It promotes tools for Practitioner that reduce waste and maximize customer insights. It limits the risks of failure by involving the customer from the start and co-creating the product with those customers. It benefits from the experimentation and learning process. As the product is prototyped and tested by customers, the details get evaluated and customers provide more accurate feedback.

It may limit the product to existing processes, methods, and technologies that promote incremental innovation due to overreliance on customers' current problems.

Tips for Success

• Human-centred design depends on the quality of interactions with actual customers, so interviews are aimed at discussions about their experience rather than interrogative answers.
• Experimentation and learning through tangible product prototypes often help in discovering deeper insights.