Difference between Human Centered Design & User Centered Design [Beginner Guide]
What is Human Centered Design?
Human-centered design (HCD) is a problem-solving technique that puts real people at the center of the development process, enabling you to create products and services that resonate real people and are made according to your audience’s needs.
Or we can say it is all about empathising with the people you’re designing for; generating tons of ideas; building a bunch of prototypes; sharing what you’ve made with the people you’re designing for; and eventually putting your innovative new solution out in the market.
3 Phases of HCD
- Observation/ Inspiration
- Ideation
- Implementation
Observation Phase:
Identifying the challenges of real time people is the first step, We need to immerse ourself in their lives and come to deeply understand their needs.This can be done by Market research.
Market research means we need to research on competitors and also, what are they lacking behind, what they failed to achieve, what they are more focusing on
Ideation Phase:
Here we identify opportunities, and create high/low fidelity prototypes, Brainstorming sessions, meet-ups, etc. for the Real people problem. The main focus should be to get to the one-in-a-million idea through collaborative efforts.
Remember, the goal of this phase is to find the right problem that you can solve with a one in a million which we say as unique solution.
Implementation Phase:
Bringing our solution to life, and eventually, to market. but before that we need to do testing. Here we try every possibility until we get the right solution to display in market.
The process is Testing, assessments, improving, and repeating until our product is ready.
Examples of HCD:
Spotify, Colgate toothbrushes, Fit-bit, Uber, Duolingo, Apple website, etc.
What is User Centered Design?
UCD is specially concise version of Human Centered Design(HCD), It is more focused on Specific Target user and has deeper analysis on them.
It is not only human centered specific but also has specific traits and features for the Targeted user.
Targeted User can be anything like, specific age group, specific gender, specific region people, etc.
So as a designer they need to analyse deeper on the preferences, interactions, usage, emotions of the targeted users, this makes product more empathetically usable to them.
UCD also has the same design phase as HCD, but in depth. Since it is an iterative process it takes more time to evaluate the UCD than HCD.
Examples of UCD:
Mail Chimp, Cartoons, Netflix, Beauty products,Apple products, etc.
Conclusion:
All the design process we build, Important task is to empathise the user and then accordingly build, so that we can make decisions faster and with a better approach.
