Color’s human-centered practice
We seek to design for people first.
We’re building a human-centered practice here at Color. I’m intentionally using continuous tense — “building” — because I’m not sure we can ever complete such an endeavor. It will always be aspirational. A work in progress.
By human-centered practice, I mean that we start with people. We attend to their goals, aspirations, contexts, and lived experiences. Then we imagine how our products might fit into and improve their lives. We try not to assume that people are our users, which can be an easy assumption if we started with a user-centered lens. Rather, we abide first and foremost to the idea that products exist within the context of people and not the other way around.
As a company, Color seeks to make it easier for people to access vital health services, such as COVID-19 testing and vaccinations. Much of our work is in partnership with public health departments and focused on reaching communities that are disproportionately impacted — communities with people who may not be our users. If we started with a user-centered approach, we might translate the experience into their language and conduct usability testing to ensure the experience is intuitive. However, just because you build it doesn’t mean they will ever come.
A human-centered approach expands the frame of reference by starting with communities’ lived experiences in order to understand and attend to their unique needs that, if left unaddressed, can lead to inequity and exclusion. For example, our Medical Equity Working Group advocated for evening and weekend hours for our COVID-19 testing sites to support hourly workers, who may have shifting schedules and a harder time leaving work in the middle of the day.
This type of approach — of being human-centered and not only user-centered — was elegantly described by Richard Buchanan in a keynote speech at the Reshaping South Africa by Design conference in 2000, where he followed on the opening remarks of the Minister of Education, Dr. Kader Asmal, who challenged an audience of designers to ground their work in the values expressed by the new constitution of South Africa. This founding document, adopted in 1996, gave (in Buchanan’s words) “central importance from the beginning to the concept of human dignity and human rights.”
He continued:
In the language of our field, we call this ‘human-centered design’. Unfortunately, we often forget the full force and meaning of the phrase and the first principle, which it expresses. This happens, for example, when we reduce our considerations of human-centered design to matters of sheer usability and when we speak merely of ‘user-centered design’. It is true that usability plays an important role in human-centered design, but the principles that guide our work are not exhausted when we have finished our ergonomic, psychological, sociological and anthropological studies of what fits the human body and mind. Human-centered design is fundamentally an affirmation of human dignity. It is an ongoing search for what can be done to support and strengthen the dignity of human beings as they act out their lives in varied social, economic, political, and cultural circumstances.
Human-centered design includes user-centered design, but its outcomes extend beyond traditional definitions of “good design” to something more akin to designing for the common good. By grounding human-centered design in the values of human dignity and human rights, Buchanan inspires us to affirm the lived experiences of all people.
We embrace a human-centered approach grounded in human dignity and human rights. It aligns with our mission at Color to help everyone lead the healthiest life that science and medicine can offer. It also means that as a human-centered practice it is imperative that we take time to know and then advocate for, not simply our users, but the people and communities that we serve.
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