First steps in Human-Centered Design
Imagine yourself as a king. You are in the position to make decisions. The people expect it from you. Because you are royal blood, you have all the resources you need. If you really want something, nothing is impossible. After all, you’re the king and you know what to do next. And if you don’t know what to do next, you always have experts around to give you advice.
You probably started reading this article because the title includes Human-Centered Design. This term might be new for you, but maybe not. Maybe you feel like a frog, or a prince in this area. In this article I want to give you a hands on guide on how to start working Human-Centered, in any area you’re in. I want you to know what to do next en how to do the next step. Let’s inaugurate you as king!
What is Human-Centered Design?
Human-Centered Design is nothing more than using the right methods for creating products — or services with the end-user at the center of all your decision making. It doesn’t matter what you create. This applies to all challenges you face in your day to day job. In doing so, you make more design decisions than you probably think. And I’m not talking about just visual designs. Believe it or not: you are a designer. Let’s embrace that and focus on the Human-Centered part.
Working Human-Centered is not just talking to your end-user. Yes, it’s important, but the decisions afterwards are made by you! Based on the input of the user of course. If you put this process in a diagram, it would look like this:
Discovering is all about asking the right questions to your end-user.
Decision making is all about making the right design choices for your product, based on the information you have collected. There are several ways to discover and to make decisions. This all depends on where you are right now in creating your product. Let’s dive in to this.
The Decision Tree
In order to help you make the right decisions, we at Randstad have created a decision tree based on Design Thinking principles. This flowchart helps you to decide what to do next when designing your product. You just simply need to follow the steps, starting with the yellow box.
First of all: nothing you do is 100% waterproof or perfect. Maybe along the way you have missed end-user routines. Or you didn’t create enough ideas. Or maybe the ideas aren’t good enough! That doesn’t matter, as long as you follow the steps from the decision tree.
Let me explain the process a bit more. The decision tree leads you through five phases. For each phase you can use different methods for which we have selected a few good ones for you.
1. Empathising
This first phase is empathising (discovery). When you empathise you try to immerse yourself in the perspective of your end-user. You ask questions to all your users. Start by creating a stakeholders map, then go into interviews and context analysis.
2. Define
When you define (decision making) you will describe the problem from the user’s perspective and translate it into an opportunity statement. Try to figure out what the user actually wants. Start by creating persona’s. Plot your empathise insights into a journey map and write down opportunity areas.
3. Ideation
With ideation (decision making) you start to generate as many ideas as possible from all possible perspectives. This is all about quantity, not quality. We have made a list of good and fun methods for generating as much as possible.
4. Validation
Validation (discovery) it is all about how the user experiences the ideas you’ve created. So, you put your ideas to the test. This can be exciting! Create sketches, wireframes of prototypes and start a user test.
5. Iterate
Iterate (discovery & disicion making) is collecting as many insights as possible and validate whether you’re meeting the predefined user goals. This phase is more about tweaking what you already have. You can make minor changes to your ideas.
Methods
I briefly mentioned some methods in the decision tree. Because I did not want to go into that too extensively, I kept it short. Below here you’ll find a link to a website were all these methods are explained. Use it to your advantage!
Remember, these methods are meant to help you work more Human-Centered. Don’t get to caught up in all the different methods. Pick one you feel confident with and start using it. It can get you out of your comfort zone and it can get messy, but that’s okay. Just keep in mind that it’s always about the outcome rather than the output! You want your product to be Human-Centered, that’s all that matters.
Enjoy the decision tree and if you have any questions you can drop them below. Cheers!
Decision Tree created by Sabine Bezuijen, Deepak Birdja and Joost Bruggeman.
