Design is Human Centred — Let’s do it right for a change!
Human Centred Design is a creative approach to problem solving that starts with people and ends with innovative solutions tailored to meet their needs. By using this framework a human perspective is considered throughout the design process which will result in tailored solutions that will be openly accepted.
As part of the Applied Innovation team at Kainos it’s important that we are always on the rising edge of new technology, where inspiration comes from thinking outside of the box. Some of the team had the opportunity to participate in a course designed to cultivate innovative thinking. The Applied Innovation Through Human Centred Design course is ran by a Belfast based company, Big motive, who specialise in delivering value in areas of digital service design, service innovation and capability development. Over the course of a day, we were shown tools and techniques that are the fundamentals behind human centred design and it’s safe to say we left full of knowledge and inspired to implement as much as we could!
We started the day with some big questions; what is innovation and what on earth is design? We all had the same idea, innovation is the new ideas we have where we create new products or services, but when it came to design we were all left a bit stumped! Design comes in many shapes and sizes, from product design, to architecture and interior design, there are a variety of ways it can be expressed and defined. These questions got us thinking from early on, that it’s not all about the look of your creation but also how it works. Don’t just take it from me, even Steve Jobs said it;
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works — Steve Jobs.
The process of Human Centred design has many forms, the model that Big Motive use contains 5 key stages;
- Empathise
- Define
- Ideate
- Prototype
- Test
Note: these 5 stages are not designed to work in a linear fashion in this process. The idea behind human centred design is to stay agile, to iterate between the stages, to constantly develop and improve your solution. Testing and improving your idea with the customer for feedback throughout the whole process. It’s impressive that Big Motive cover this process in one week, but for this course we managed to do this in a day, with only an hour on each stage!
Empathise
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
In the case of human centred design the empathise stage revolves around understanding your user through interviewing a variety of different people who will interact with your solution. How can we understand their needs and develop for them if we don’t know what the customer wants?
To start off this process we divided ourselves into teams to discuss recent issues that our team members had encountered with products or services. We then chose one of these to tackle as an exercise for the rest of the day. During this stage we developed personas for our user (a fellow team member), laying out their goals and behaviours into one document; this is then the point of reference for the team to keep them working towards solving the problem for a specific individual.
Define
During this stage of design, we worked in our teams to fully understand and define the Needs Statement, or Problem Statement, for our persona. For the Needs Statement, we try to address as many pain points of the persona as possible to help expose any underlying issues they may have. Once we had understood all the pain points we then moved on to creating this statement using the format of;
[Customer] needs a way to [do something that addresses their need] so that [they benefit directly].
In our teams case, our customer had pain points relating to the current public transport system in his area, hence his Needs Statement was;
Marc needs a reliable, cost effective way of getting to work so that he is punctual and has credibility.
By creating the Needs Statement the team had a simple project brief to keep refreshing their focus on. The needs statement also enables us to start thinking how we might tackle the customers issues by asking “How Might We?”. Addressing this question we can come up with other angles to look at the problem from, for example; instead of trying to fix public transport how can we make Marc appear more credible at work?
Ideate
The word Ideate stems from the process of Ideation = Idea + Generation, which means the formation of ideas and concepts.
At this stage of the process it’s important to do some quick fire idea generation with rough sketches to get the ideas flowing. To get us geared up for this process we completed the 30 circles challenge, turning as many circles we could into recognisable objects in 60 seconds.
We then moved on to use the Four Step Sketch process to generate ideas we could take forward into the prototyping stage. The first step of the process revolves around reviewing your information from the persona, needs statement and how might we section, making notes to refresh your memory. After this we go into the idea phase that involves jotting down messy ideas all over the page in the form of words and doodles; once this is complete, review them and circle your favourites.
Your favourite doodles are the ideas that go through to stage three for the phase called Crazy8’s; which involves taking a blank A4 page and folding it into eight sections to fill with idea sketches, with only 60 seconds per section. Crazy8’s was an important step of the process, creating a rapid idea development environment where each idea is limited to the small space of the box. This leaves us with 8 viable and quick fire creations that can be expanded on for the next stage.
The final stage is now upon us! The fourth stage is where we take the best idea from stage 3 to create a solution sketch over three post it sized boxes. The solution sketch is the hypothesis on how you would solve the problem at hand and should be a more detailed version of your best idea. Why post it sized boxes I hear you ask? This is designed to keep your concept sketches precise and confined, allowing them to be clearly understood while the blank space around the boxes is used for additional explanation notes.
This whole process seems like a lot of work to create one solution, but in the end we now have one clear, well developed idea we can move forward with into the prototype stage.
Prototype
Prototyping is the stage where we get all those ideas we have in our heads down on to paper and make them reality. Before we start jumping into solutions, it is important to remember that prototypes can be as simple as sketches with pen and paper. By creating simple low fidelity prototypes we are keeping the time and cost investment to a minimum, which makes it easier for us to quickly and cheaply iterate through ideas with the user. The sooner the prototype makes it to the user for the testing phase, the the sooner we will know the issues and changes that need to be made, before we even start building anything.
During the course we used simple paper based prototypes that revolved around a storyboard design; storyboarding the idea is a way to visually communicate your solution and create a story to show to the customer.
Test
At this point it is time to take our prototype to the user and get some feedback on our idea! Feedback and testing with the customer can come in many forms, starting with test cards and ending with a feedback grid. A feedback grid is a paper way of gaining the user thoughts enabling the focus on things that the customer would change or has more questions for. There are 4 key areas to a feedback grid;
- Ideas to try
- Things that worked
- Things to Change
- Questions we still have
By splitting the feedback into four sections, we can walk away from the user testing phase with positive and constructive thoughts that can be developed on in the next iteration. You should look upon the testing phase as an opportunity to learn more about your solution, and what it will look like. In doing this there will ultimately be a greater uptake and an impact on building a truly useful solution, compared to one forced to development.
While this might seem like the end of the process we are nowhere near finished. This process was never intended to be linear and as you go through the 5 steps you will realise that this is a fluid process; where as you have new discoveries at each stage you will divert between the various stages. The beauty of this is that as we iterate between prototyping, testing and discovery, we can quickly spot issues, new needs or improvements that will ultimately drive us to a better, less complex, solution.
Innovation through Human Centred Design was an eye opening course and for a developer it was a learning experience to see how solutions can be developed in a user driven way. It highlighted the fact that we are hard wired to automatically try to build solutions, but now we know jumping to that isn’t always the best way, and for our users the best solution is the one we create with them, not for them. It’s also okay to say to customers that we don’t know what that solution will look like and customers that are open and willing to come on the development journey with us will end up with a solution that better fits the user needs as a result. The tools and techniques we covered were just the start of the thought journey and we have taken away innovative design thinking that can be brought into our teams and projects.
For those interested in learning more about Human Centred Design the Big Motive course is a great investment that you won’t regret. Lastly, you’re probably wondering how we are using this within the Applied Innovation Team at Kainos. Well I just conducted my first user research interview last week, how’s that for Human Centred Design?
If you are interested in contacting the innovation team to discover more about what we do, feel free to send us an email: appliedinnovation@kainos.com or check out some of our other projects here.
Thanks to Ryan McCollum and Rebecca Walsh for the amazing course!
