WHAT IS HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN?

Human-centered design 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 and are tailored to your audience’s needs.
The goal is to keep users’ wants, pain points, and preferences front of mind during
every phase of the process. In turn, you’ll build more intuitive, accessible products
that are likely to turn a higher profit because your customers have already vetted
the solution and feel more invested in using it.
THE PHASES OF HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN
In Harvard Business School Online’s Design Thinking and Innovation Course,
HBS Dean Srikant Datar breaks human-centered design down into four stages:
1. Clarify
2. Ideate
3. Develop
4. Implement
 Here’s what each step of the process means and how you can implement it to
create products and services people love.
1. Clarify
This first phase is dedicated to collecting data and observing your customers to
clarify the problem and how you might solve it. Rather than develop products
based on assumptions, you conduct user research and assess customer needs to
determine what prospective buyers want.
The clarify phase requires empathy—the capability of understanding another
person’s experiences and emotions. You need to consider your customers’
perspectives and ask questions to determine what products they’re currently using,
why and how they’re using them, and the challenges they’re trying to solve.
During this phase, you want to discover customers’ pain points, which Dean Datar
breaks down into two types:
 Explicit: These are pain points users can describe; they’re aware of what
frustrates them about their current experience.
 Latent: These are pain points users can’t describe and might not even know
exist.
“Users will be upfront about explicit pain points,” says Dean Datar in Design
Thinking and Innovation. “But researchers will need to dig into the experience—
observing, listening, and trying it for themselves to get at the latent pain points that
lead to transformative innovation.”
To determine your customers’ pain points, observe people using your product
and conduct user interviews. Ask questions such as:
 What challenge were you trying to solve when you bought this product?
 What other options did you consider when making your decision?
 What made you choose this product over the alternatives?
With each answer, you’ll start to generate insights you can use to create a problem
statement from your users’ perspective. That’s what you’ll try to solve in the
following phases.
2. Ideate
The inspiration you gather in the first phase will lead you to the second: ideate.
During this stage, you can apply different design thinking tools, such as systematic
inventive thinking (SIT) or brainstorming, to overcome cognitive fixedness—
 a mindset in which you consciously or unconsciously assume there’s only one way
to interpret or approach a situation.
Once you’ve overcome cognitive fixedness, the goal is to generate dozens of ideas
to amplify creativity and ensure no one gets attached to a potential solution before
it’s been tested.
3. Develop
The develop phase is when you combine and critique the ideas you’ve
brainstormed to create a range of possible solutions. By combining and evaluating
your ideas, you can better meet users’ needs and determine what you want to move
into prototyping to reduce costs, save time, and increase your final product’s
quality.
Three characteristics of human-centered design that are vital to consider when
critiquing ideas are desirability, feasibility, and viability.
 Desirability: Does this innovation fulfill user needs, and is there a market for it?
 Feasibility: Is this functionally possible? Does the organization have the
resources to produce this innovation? Are there any legal, economic, or
technological barriers?
 Viability: Is this innovation sustainable? Can the company continue to produce
or deliver this product profitably over time?
When you start prototyping, you should have presumed answers to these questions
so you can learn more about your concepts quickly and, ideally, at a low cost.
4. Implement
The final phase of the process is implementation. During this stage, it’s crucial to
communicate your innovation’s value to internal and external stakeholders,
including colleagues and consumers, to bring it to market successfully, encourage
adoption, and maintain growth.
In the implementation phase, take time to reflect on your organization’s culture and
assess group dynamics. Is your team empowered to develop and iterate on user-
focused solutions? You can’t continue creating innovative solutions without the
right culture.
It’s important to note that your work isn’t over once you reach the final phase.
Customers’ wants and needs will continue to evolve. Your goal is to adapt to meet
them. Keeping humans at the center of the development process will ensure you’re
continuously innovating and achieving product-market fit.
HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN IN ACTION
A great example of human-centered design is a children’s toothbrush that’s still in
use today. In the mid-nineties, Oral-B asked global design firm IDEO to develop a
new kid’s toothbrush. Rather than replicating what was already on the market—a
slim, shorter version of an adult-sized toothbrush—IDEO’s team went directly to
the source; they watched children brush their teeth.
What they realized is that kids had a hard time holding the skinnier toothbrushes
their parents used because they didn’t have the same dexterity or motor skills.
Children needed toothbrushes with a big, fat, squishy grip that was easier to hold
on to.
“Now every toothbrush company in the world makes these,” says IDEO Partner
Tom Kelley in a speech. “But our client reports that after we made that little, tiny
discovery out in the field—sitting in a bathroom watching a five-year-old boy
brush his teeth—they had the best-selling kid’s toothbrush in the world for 18
months.”
Had IDEO’s team not gone out into the field—or, in this case, children’s homes—
they wouldn’t have observed that small opportunity, which turned a big profit for
Oral-B.

What’s the difference between human-centered design and design thinking?

Human-centered design is a creative approach to problem solving. It’s the

backbone of all our work at IDEO (IDEO is a global design company. We
believe a better future is for all of us to design.). It’s a process that starts with
the people you’re designing with and ends with new solutions that are purpose-
built to suit their needs. Human-centered design is about cultivating deep empathy
with the people you’re designing with; generating ideas; building a bunch of
prototypes; sharing what you’ve made together; and eventually, putting your
innovative new solution out in the world.
Design thinking, as IDEO's Tim Brown explains, is a human-centered approach to
innovation. It draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the
possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success. Successful
innovations rely on some element of human-centered design research while
balancing other elements. Design thinking helps achieve that balance. It lets people
find the sweet spot of feasibility, viability, and desirability while considering the
real needs and desires of people.

 Design thinking looks at the bigger picture: It focused on innovation and

creating products or services that solve problems.
 Human-centred design looks at the details: It is a way of improving the
usability and the user experience of a particular product or service.
 Whilst Design Thinking is a Process, Human-Centred Design is a mindset.
Differences between human-centered design and design thinking:
 Design thinking starts before product design, while human-centered design
comes during and after product development.
 While design thinking is more of a creative approach, human-centered
design is based on real data.
 Where design thinking encourages innovative solutions, the human-centered
design prioritizes good usability and a great user experience.
Similarities between the two methods:
 They’re both user-centric.
 Both methods are driven by empathy.
 Both methods are iterative.

How companies can apply design thinking to solve problems

Example of the power of design thinking in science. Over several decades one of
the biggest challenges for NASA engineers was to safely land the Mars rover.
Historically, rovers had 3 legs that often broke when they crashed into the planet's
surface at speed. One of the NASA engineers, Mark Adler looked at the issue
with rovers from a different angle. He realized that the true problem was not the
durability of rover legs but gravity, which caused a crushing hit during landing.
Adler's solution was brilliantly simple - to equip the Mars rover with air cushions
that covered it like a cocoon, making it bounce off the surface up to 40 times
before the final stop.

Design thinking isn’t an exclusive privilege for heavy industry. Ordinary things
that we are used to, like a safety belt or a Heinz ketchup bottle, are great examples
of what happens when a person asks “What if…?”