Human Centered Design
“User experience is everything. It always has been, but it’s undervalued and underinvested in. If you don’t know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it”.
– Evan Williams, Co-Founder Twitter
Human Centered Design is the industry and ISO standard methodology for creating outstanding usability and user experience. It involves three primary activities: 1) Field studies- analyzing user needs and desires; 2) Interaction Design: Rapid wireframe prototyping of potential solutions and 3) User Testing your designs with users to gain design feedback. 4) Service Design- services from user needs to blueprinting and service delivery.
Definition:
Human-centered design is an iterative methodology for creating great experiences (or user experience "UX"). It is also employed to accomplish the activities that make up the new innovation technique called Design Thinking. The international standards organization specifies Human-centered design for interactive systems in ISO standard 9241-210. Human-centered or Community-Centered Design means you put the recipient of your service or design at the center of your decision-making process by including them and giving them a voice, control, and access to your development process.
Human-centered design is about changing how you approach your product, service, or experience design. How? You involve stakeholders (including users!) early on in your requirements specification and throughout the design and development process. This helps you avoid failure caused by assuming you know what users want!
Organizing screens around how users think also helps your avoid the known problems inherent in making users follow designer intuitions, or developer rules. Finally testing to see if designs make sense to users, and if users can perceive and locate key interface controls, can help you mitigate poor quality or lost business.
Agile or Lean UX teams use Human-centered design as a grounding mechanism to deliver good user experience. Human-centered design ultimately is about changing your organizational culture from Inside-Out to Outside-In. This means you approach UX design, development and business decisions from the customer's perspective, needs, and behaviors-- not your organization's point of view.
Benefits:
- Avoid poorly designed experiences, products/ services.s.
- Optimize for end-user needs, goals, and desires.
- Gain insights needed to put users at the center of the user experience.
- Enjoy the ROI gained on reducing development time and improving efficiency.
Methods we use:
Field Studies, Ethnography, Service Design, Interaction Design, Information Architecture, UI Design, Emotion Design, Usability Testing, Eyetracking.
Deliverables:
Research on user needs and testing with users, Prototyping new directions, Organizational development: teaching you to fish.
Human Centered Design is where great experiences are born because it involves stakeholders (users) along the entire journey.
When to Do:
- Human Centered Design is a methodology, which means you ideally are doing all aspects of Human Centered Design including not just wireframe prototypes but user research, and user testing.
- Anytime during the product or service lifecycle.
- Ideally doing Human Centered Design at the start of a new product, service or program is ideal.
How to use with Lean UX:
- Field studies are performed in a cycle zero, gaining directional feedback before the sprint cycles begin.
- Wireframing occurs at the start of the first 2-3 sprints.
- Usability testing occurs toward the end of the sprint (on new or redesign projects) or up-front (if used to understand where a current product stands).