In Pursuit of human centered design
Over the last 3 years I have worked on User Experience of almost 30 Digital Products & I was happy with the work I did. It wasn’t the best design to be ever produced but it helped several start-ups to put their product into the market. And I was happy to have contributed to their journeys and all the learnings that I had on the way. But then last week I stumbled upon this video. It has kept me up; reflecting on my 5 years of design practice and whether the design choices I made were right or not. The video:
Soon after sharing this video with close friends, my friend Jasmeet made me ponder over whether we really are human centered designers. Whether today’s designers design for their user’s wellbeing or for the engagement metric? HCD is one of the foundation of a designer’s practice but do we even know how to be human centered designers? All the examples given by Joe in the video talk about how every other start-up today strives to get our attention. Business growth is defined by metrics like engagement and GMV. Among all of this what focus are we really putting on the user?
So late last night I started to think seriously about human centered design & by today afternoon, I had a list of guiding principles; HCD should be non-addictive; intelligent; flawed by design etc. But I do not know enough about Design to even begin writing that list. So I picked up a tangential direction on the lines of “What is the value that design adds to our lives?”. Somewhere along the way I drew a linear diagram that just said this :
Design -> Use -> Consequences
It the journey of any product I have ever made. First, its designed based on some qualitative and secondary research, then its used & after that the consequences become visible. I wondered what it might look like if we inverted this model and designed screens in a way that made users conscious about the consequences of their interactions on a digital product.
Articulate Consequence -> Design -> Use
It resonated with one tenets of good design that I find to be the most powerful one :
Good design is honest.
- Dieter Rams
With physical products it was easier to judge a product & consequences of its purchase. Its value, price, functions everything is there in front of a consumer’s eye but its not the same with digital products. An analogy could be that of paying from a wallet & paying via a card. When you pay from your wallet, you can see the balance & it informs your decision to shop or pass. Its not the same with digital money, it flows easily because their is literally no weight in it. Even the notification you get is after you have made the purchase.
So I thought can we design a digital product like an e-com shopping site in a manner that clearly visualizes the consequences of his shopping decisions?
Here’s what I came up with:
Meet Pat-
Pat is 26 years old; lives in an urban city; makes around Rs.60,000 per month; shops books & clothes regularly. He generally ends up spending a little more on shopping than what he budgets for them. Its only at the end of the month he realizes that he’ll be go broke by 26th unless he starts living modestly during the last week.
None of the current shopping sites and apps take into account the consequences Pat faces at the end of the month.
But what if he could see how his shopping decision will affect him at the end of the month? What if the screen paid a fuck about letting Pat not go broke by the end of the month? What if, every month or quarter he sets his budget for shopping for books and clothes. His shopping history and budget is maintained & shown to him when he is about to shop. When he logs in for shopping the interface looks something like this. [This is a very rough 10 min sketch]

Here Pat can clearly see the consequence of shopping for clothes — he’ll have to make up for it some other day. The screen does not attempt to entice Pat either monetarily {discounts} or aesthetically {larger than life imagery}. I feel this puts Pat in a more informed state of shopping than the current sites. I can’t say if this is a better design but is it a more informing design? Yes. Do you think this can be called an example of human centered design? Of-course it will impact the business in huge way. But my question is how are we prioritizing “business growth” vs “human’s wellbeing”[In this case its financial wellbeing, in other cases it could be psychological or physical]?
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This is one in a series of articles exploring what is human centered design. I felt rather than writing commandments myself, a better approach would be to start a constructive discourse among the design community & what’s the best way to have a discussion, if not, by having a tangible output on the table.
