You’re doing it wrong: The Human Centered Design Process in International Development is Flawed.
I work mostly with governments and international development organizations. Human Centered Design has become the buzzword du jour, right behind the dreaded Innovation, a word that gives me the physical reaction of my eyes rolling.
In a recent meeting where I was asked to explain Human Centered Design, because it sounds like a bunch of nonsense, I had to start with “Well…” which is never good. Human Centered Design is great — except for when it’s not because no one understand what you are talking about. I have a lot of questions and comments on this lately mostly because I’ve just been cringing every time I say the phrase. It’s been co-opted into this thing that everyone writes in because they know that they should do it, but they aren’t 100% sure how to actually do it. There are Human Centered Design courses and experts and all in all we’ve really turned this thing into a beast with no name. I often find myself thinking the following thoughts:
What if your humans don’t have the answers? What if they’re wrong? What if they’re just not that into post it notes and white boarding? Do you get new humans? Do you teach the old humans new tricks?
Human centered design relies on a lot of resources that just aren’t typically available in international development settings. What often happens is that instead of actually spending the time and effort to co-design with end users, we make critical mistakes with the HCD process that end up bastardizing it into something that it isn’t, and then blame the process for not yielding the results we wanted. We’re locked into donor money that is slotted for specific activities and deviating from what is mandated and pivoting quickly are really hard things to do when you have limited funds. Here are a few “Human Centered Design” mistakes I’ve seen over and over again:
We formalize it into publishable research.
If we aren’t publishing it, then why are we interviewing people, having a focus group, or running a workshop? Why are we doing it if we aren’t gaining academic glory?
HCD is really about product development, and it doesn’t always need to be formalized into ethics reviews and manuscripts. These things cost a lot of time and money and formalizing the process into a research endeavor makes it less flexible and constricted to research. It’s not formal research. It’s just basic information gathering.
We front load it, doing it all at the beginning of a project and then never going back to follow-up.
In the beginning of product development, we talk to a few people. We pilot test and host a design workshop. Then we wash our hands clean of it and never go back to talk to the end users. We did HCD! Ta Da! We make the mistake of thinking we know what is going on and the idea of scraping any of our hard work or re-designing the end product is just too daunting. We scale our product and chug along until the whole thing breaks down and we don’t know why.
We treat HCD like a checkbox.
A reviewer on a proposal said the phrase “Human Centered Design.” Having no real idea of what this means, we throw the phrase in a few times to satisfy their thirst for HCD. In reality, there is no attempt to actually adopt these techniques and we just continually say it without actually adopting any of the philosophies or approaches.
Don’t do these things. They are bad. Be better than that. Here’s how:
- Write HCD activities into your plan, write them in multiple times and set aside a budget for regular HCD activities throughout the product lifecycle.
2. Be informal and open to flexibility. Be ready to accept that you might have gotten it wrong in your proposal writing.
3. Don’t live in a bubble. Bring others into your circle who have different perspectives.
4. Think like a designer, or at least read the stuff from Ideo, who are designers with thoughts.
5. Talk to the people you are designing the end product for often. Don’t stop talking with them and engaging them in the process. They have most of the answers, if not all of them. If you think they don’t, go find more people and talk to them.
