What is human centred-design?

Human-centred design can transform businesses.

In this post, we run through the fundamental principles of human-centred design (HCD) and what you should focus on to create more customer-centric solutions.

Many studies show that companies — and organisations — that adopt HCD outperform their peers and generate more value — for their customers by creating more relevant user experiences.

What is a human-centred design?

At its core, HCD puts the user first when you design new products and services. 

The approach starts by asking some simple questions: what unmet needs do people have? What frustrations and tensions are they trying to resolve?

You need to spend time with your target customer to create hypotheses about these neglected needs.

Next, a prototyping phase focuses on solving these needs. This step is iterative and involves co-creating with users to zero in on the optimum solution. With each iteration, you become more confident in how to deliver ideas that are of value, unique and relevant.

How does this differ from other types of innovation?

People often contrast HCD with R&D or technology-driven innovation, i.e. the invention of a scientific, technology or engineering breakthrough.

We're all familiar with such R&D driven inventions: from health apps on smartphones and wearables, fermented ingredients for gut health, to on-demand and digital subscription services. However, to be successful, these solutions would have involved elements of HCD in the creation of the final product for it to be of value to people. For instance, successful technology companies like Apple and Adobe are famous for asking questions about how can technology help the end-user achieve what they want to accomplish, but better? 

In highly competitive markets, HCD will often be the factor that determines how successful you are. In healthcare, HCD can deliver better patient outcomes and service efficiencies.

What are the critical steps associated with HCD?

Scope: define the project objectives and have guide-rails

Insight: understand your users' needs, the problems they are trying to solve

Opportunities: distil your insights into human-centred opportunities and prioritise where to focus

Ideas and co-creation: incubate ideas, develop and experiment with low-fidelity prototypes to find the optimal and feasible solution

Align: select your leading idea and chart out the steps for the project team to deliver the final solution

Let's briefly look at what's critical at each step.

Scope

It is essential to provide focus and guide-rails for the team to move with direction and pace. Constraints foster creativity. Explore limitations by asking questions. For instance: do we focus on new or existing customers? Do we look at new or existing retail channels? What if this required a new digital platform — is that OK? When do we need to launch this? 

Be clear who your target consumer is. If you are a healthy food brand designing a new dairy proposition, the mindset and health needs of someone in their 20s who is actively healthy are likely to be very different from someone in their 60s who is looking to maintain their health. A tight definition of your target audience will make the insight step more productive.

Insight

Customer insight is a vital starting point for HCD.

Start by mining your existing market research and analytics for clues before you commission any new user research. Spot opportunities and bring these to life as posters, customer journeys and 'personas' of your target audience so the team can start to engage and empathise with the needs of the people you are designing for.

These starting points help you pinpoint gaps in your customer understanding.

To fill these insight gaps, spend time with the people you are designing for: in their homes, at work, at play. The context in which your product plays a role in their lives determines the final design solution. By spending time with your target customers, you can delve deeper and understand what frustrations they have, and workarounds they created because the existing products don't satisfy their needs.

Opportunities

Coming out of the insight phase, you'll have hunches and a better understanding of your users' problems — what they are trying to resolve. In the prototyping and co-creation stage, you'll uncover more customer insights. Yet, at this point, the team need to distil what you've found into opportunity areas - the focus for prototyping in the next step.

Ideas and co-creation

At this point in the HCD approach, it is worth considering what you are trying to achieve. HCD aims to create solutions that are of value to the user. 

The purpose of a concept or prototype is to test your assumptions about users' needs and the features required to meet these needs.

Use prototypes to test assumptions.

For example: Is this solution helping or hindering people achieve what they want to achieve? What have we overlooked? What features need to be improved? How we talk to people about this idea to grab their attention: claims and messaging. How does the experience vary at different steps of the customer journey?

A prototype can take many forms: a storyboard that walks the user through a service experience, a concept visual, adcepts, simple functioning digital mockups, tasting samples, a video explainer, and so forth. In reality, you can prototype any user experience. Crucially, keep it simple. Keep it low resolution. The aim is to find flaws in your thinking and how to improve ideas. At each iteration of a concept your ideas will improve.

Hunt for flaws in your thinking

Involve your target consumers

Expose your ideas to your target consumers and get them to help refine and identify how to optimise them. In this co-design step, you will likely uncover new insights. Keep your eyes and ears open for these. It's difficult for people to articulate their needs, but these surface when people are presented with a prototype solution: 'I don't need it to do this, but I need it to do that!'

We find that co-creation step yields the most surprising and meaningful human-centred insights, which lead to breakthrough ideas.

Use this time to get help from users to jump-start new ideas, improvements and determine what features and benefits they value and what is not essential to them. 

Also, consider feasibility. Every team works to operational and cost limitations. Know what these are, and pressure test them. For instance, if your manufacturing is limited to specific packaging formats in the short term, is this restricting the potential of a concept or not? Do you have regulatory constraints that limit the claims you can make? 

If you are aware of these constraints, you can design alternative concepts to explore potential barriers and fix them. For example, when working on new claims, we find co-creation helps uncover different phrases and expressions of a benefit that can work for consumers and please the regulatory folk!

Align

The final step is to lock down your leading solution and chart out a path forward for the project team.

HCD helps project teams in the following ways:

• You can identify and clearly articulate the leading concept(s)

• You have a greater understanding of what features and benefits are of value to the consumer and what you can and cannot compromise.

• You can determine if a multi-staged launch is required, i.e. beta test an initial idea while you continue to iterate and improve the next generation solution.

• Create user-centred design principles. A project team will encounter practical obstacles: cost, quality, time. If they understand the human insights behind the solution and the design principles that got to the idea, they will understand the consequences of any compromises they have to make. These might be minor, which has minimal impact on the user experience. Or they might be deal-breakers, such as recipe formulation change which limits the claims you can make for a health food, which was core to the concept's success. Design principles help project teams problem-solve effectively.

To sum up:

Human-centred design is as much a mindset as a process or set of techniques, that yields strong business outcomes

• Put the user at the centre of your innovation activities

• Focus on understanding their unresolved needs and frustrations

• Co-design with the help of your users

• Use iterative prototyping methods to design concepts with greater potential

If you need help to unlock human centred design drop us line. We’d love to help.