Planning a Human-Centered Design Process: With Business and Human Quality Goals in Mind

To create successful products, it’s imperative to design a user experience that satisfies both business goals and user needs. The Human-Centered Design process is a critical approach in accomplishing this aim since it prioritizes human-centered quality objectives. By putting human-centered quality goals at the forefront, this approach ensures that the resulting products align with users’ needs and expectations, thereby increasing their chances of success.

In this article, I will talk about the first step of the Human-Centered Design process and illustrate why having a clear understanding of human-centered quality goals at the beginning of each project is critical. Additionally, I will discuss how to integrate these goals into the user experience project plan without neglecting business objectives.

If you are unfamiliar with the steps of the Human-Centered Design Process, I highly recommend reading the first introductory blog article in this series, Designing for Humans: The Importance of Human-Centered Design in Software Development.

Step 1: Plan human-centered design process

The main objective of this step is to formulate and define project goals from the user perspective, which are call human-centered quality goals. These goals should relate to at least one quality dimension, such as usability, user experience, accessibility, and avoidance of harm from use. By defining these quality goals, we can determine the path that the human-centered design process needs to take without neglecting the user’s point of view. Additionally, defining these goals will aid in assessing the amount of information required about the context of use that has to be researched.

Nevertheless, in a day-to-day work setting, when writing the UX Project Plan, it may not always be necessary to explicitly state the quality dimension associated. However, it’s essential to be able to derive the quality dimension from the project goals, as they can highlight issues that need improvement. For example, in an Agile environment, these goals can be addressed in the introduction or background of an epic or initiative.

Human-centered quality goals are not usage requirements

To avoid confusion, it is important to distinguish between usage requirements and human-centered quality goals. Usage requirements refer to what users need to be able to do to perform a task when interacting with a system. On the other hand, human-centered quality goals are distinct and focus on guiding the development project from the user’s perspective, thereby supporting the planning of the human-centered design process.

Human-centered quality goals based on business goals

It’s essential to consider that human-centered quality goals should always align with business goals. While this approach may appear controversial, it is necessary to define human-centered quality objectives that satisfy both parties. As Teresa Torres highlights in her interview with Dan Olsen (2021):

“Don’t forget that your goal is to ship value to customers in a way that creates business value without neglecting customer value.”

(Sorry if isn’t exactly that words, but I will trust in my notes)

Anyway, I highly recommend you to watch the interview here:

If you don’t want time to watch it, no worries. I’ll provide a brief explanation of Teresa Torres’ key points, so you won’t need to read through the entire interview. And she states something like this:

Product teams cannot always directly influence business goals, as they are often lagging indicators that measure past performance and are challenging to change. Therefore, product teams must translate business goals into product goals that align with user needs, and desires.

For example, to reduce churn rate, the product team may need to increase customer engagement measured by the total number of hours customers use the software to perform a particular task. In this line, the ultimate outcome of a product team should always be measured as a change in human behavior that drives business goals.

At the customer level, it’s crucial to understand that customers care about outcomes, not just outputs (features). But, what are customer outcomes?

Customer outcomes are divided in three categories:

• Functional outcomes: the core tasks the customer wants to accomplish (e.g., using a car to travel from point A to point B).
• Emotional outcomes: how customers want to feel or avoid feeling as a result of using your product (e.g., feeling safe, free, or joyful).
• Social outcomes: how customers want to be perceived by others when using your product (e.g., what Tesla says about your status or values).

Therefore, gaining a deep understanding of the outcome that users want to achieve (aka users’ job-to-be-done) is key because they seek to uncover the metrics that users use to measure success when trying to achieve a goal (aka get the job done). Understand the desired user’s outcome, it will enable you and the team to measure the impact of your work effectively and avoid wasting time on things that no one cares, like unnecessary features. That’s why knowing what users expect to gain, solve, or fulfill from their interaction with a product or service is crucial. Moreover, customer outcomes are an excellent tool for measuring the change in perceived value of a product and designing a value proposition.

And this is what User Experience is all about. If we look at the definition of user experience according to DIN EN ISO 9241–11. User experience is defined as “a user’s perception and reactions resulting from the use and/or anticipated use of a product, system or service.” Thus, user experience considers emotional, belief, and value dimensions before, during, and after use.

Figure 1: Adapted from Geis and Tesch (2019)

A data-driven approach is essential to mitigate risks and make informed decisions in UX design. However, understanding the type of customer outcome alone is not enough, we also need to be sure of affecting the right metric with our improvements. Therefore, to take the right approach to design, we need to consider which hedonic and pragmatic measuring factors are relevant to the project. These factors enable us to define the dimensions or measures of UX that align with user needs, business objectives, and product goals. And by incorporating emotional, belief, and value dimensions before, during, and after product use, we can create a holistic user experience that meets the needs of our users and achieves our business objectives.

Figure 2: Pragmatic and Hedonic UX — Unknown original author

In this context, functional outcomes are correlated with pragmatic measures such as error avoidance, effectiveness, self-descriptiveness, efficiency, user control, and clarity. It is important to note that these measures are usability metrics that are crucial during task performance.

Additionally, there are hedonic measures that are relevant to emotional and social customer outcomes, such as attractiveness, satisfaction, identity, and willingness to recommend, for example. These measures are not directly related to task performance, but are significant in terms of customer perception and loyalty.

Parts of the UX Project Plan and Deliverables

The parts of a User Experience Project Plan include:

1. Background and Human-centered quality goals
2. User group involved
3. Scope
4. Methodology
5. Research and testing activities
6. Design activities
7. Costs and time

During the planning step, the UX designer should select the UX deliverables for each phase of Human-Centered Design Process.

As I mentioned in the first article of the serie: Designing for Humans: The Importance of Human-Centered Design in Software Development, the process consists of five steps and for each step there are specific deliverables or artifacts that UX designers needs to consider. For example, as you can see in the list below, in step two, the designer needs to create user group profiles, task models of the current context of use, and current scenarios. These deliverables help for usability engineering purposes or to communicate the context of use to stakeholders.

Here the list of deliverables by step 👇

Step 1: Plan human-centered design process

For the usability engineering:

• User experience project plan including human-centered quality goals
• Epics or initiatives

Step 2: Understand and specify the context of use

For the usability engineering:

• User group profiles
• Task models (of the current context of use)
• Current scenarios

For communicating to stakeholders:

• Personas
• User journey maps (of the current context of use)

Step 3: Specify usage requirements

For the usability engineering:

• Requirements
• Usage requirements
• Affinity diagrams

Step 4: Generate design solutions to meet usage requirements

For the usability engineering:

• Usage scenarios
• Task models (of the context of use, taking into account the interactive system)
• Information architecture and navigation structure
• Style guide
• Wireframes, Low fidelity prototypes and High fidelity prototypes

For communication to stakeholders:

• Storyboard
• User journey maps (of the context of use, taking into account the interactive system)

Step 5: Evaluate design solutions against usage requirements

For the usability engineering and communication with stakeholders:

• Usability evaluation reports

The list of steps may seem overwhelming, but it’s important to note that not all of them may be necessary depending on the context. In an Agile environment, it can be challenging, if not impossible, to follow all these steps and produce all the required artefacts. That’s why there are several approaches to design, such as Lean UX, Design Sprints, and Dual-track Agile UX, which aim to integrate UX seamlessly into Agile environments. I will cover these topics in more detail in a dedicated blog post.

Main Takeaways

A UX designer should be able to plan a human-centered design process that focuses on tackling real problems, which are not only relevant for the user but also for the business.

It’s important to note that the activities in this first step are not set in stone and may change based on new insights. This can mean that user group details and scope may be sharpened in step two.

While it’s challenging to extract all these steps in an agile environment, there are approaches to design like Lean UX, Design Sprints, and Dual-track Agile UX that can help. The UX Project Plan is the foundation for what comes next in the process and sets the direction for the development project from the user’s perspective. It’s essential to have clarity of the human-centered quality goals and ensure that they relate to at least one quality dimension, such as usability, user experience, accessibility, or avoiding harm from use. Planning UX activities takes time and should be considered during the project or epic prospecting stage.

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References:

Thomas Geis and Guido Tesch(2019) ‘Basiswissen Usability und User Experience: Aus- und Weiterbildung’

Teresa Torres (2021) ‘The What & Why of Continues Discovery by Teresa Torres’ Interview made by Don Olsen https://youtu.be/yNCcQODWYh0