A human-centered design approach

What are the principles and the benefits of a human-centered design (HCD) approach?

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Today we live in a social and economic context that is changing quickly and without pause: fashions change, products change, professions change; the market changes. The natural consequence is that companies also change, in the way they approach their market, in the way they design the product and meet demand.

For anyone who works in user experience (UX), this means — ideally — adopting a design approach known as “human-centered”: products and services are not designed around “users”, more or less abstract and impersonal figures, but put people at the centre, people who use our products while living their lives, feeling emotions and facing different obstacles.

These principles have been set out in detail in the ISO 9241-210 standard, which nevertheless still uses the word “user” in its definition of “human-centered”. According to that definition, “human-centered design is an approach to interactive systems that aims to make systems usable and useful by focusing on the users, their needs and requirements, and by applying human factors/ergonomics, and usability knowledge and techniques. This approach enhances effectiveness and efficiency, improves human well-being, user satisfaction, accessibility and sustainability; and counteracts possible adverse effects of use on human health, safety and performance.”

In this article we look together at the fundamental principles of human-centered design, why it matters to put people at the centre, and how at Conflux we apply this approach in our work.

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What is user-centered design?

User-centered design was already being discussed in 1977, and in recent decades this philosophy has never stopped evolving and updating its methods and techniques. In this view, the conception, development and testing of a service have the customer’s needs at the centre.

User-centered design consists in developing a series of processes aimed at placing the person who will use the product or service, and their needs, at the centre of the design. This approach reverses the tendency of companies to focus on purely technical aspects of the product and on a constant search for cutting-edge tools that generate solutions that are hardly intuitive or user-friendly for the person at the end of the chain: the desires, needs and abilities of the people who will use the product are the starting point of this kind of design process.

Before the product is developed, an analysis is carried out on the people who will use it and on their needs; during development, collecting their feedback is essential.

Among the leading experts in the discipline is Donald Norman, one of the first to use, in his publications, the term human-centered design or people-centered design. The differences between these definitions and that of user-centered design are very subtle, and they lie in the difference between “user” and “human” (a person, more generally). In other words, a human-centered design approach would involve in the design process not only the people who use the product, but also other interested parties who interact with the new product even only indirectly.

“This approach enhances effectiveness and efficiency, improves human well-being, user satisfaction, accessibility and sustainability.”

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The principles of human-centered design

The HCD (or user-centered design) approach is based on a number of fundamental principles, defined by the ISO 9241-210:2019 standard, which govern the development processes of a product or service.

• Design is based on an understanding of the people you are dealing with, of their tasks and of their environment. As well as having a clear picture of your intended audience, you need to deepen your knowledge of the environment in which the person moves.
• Involve people throughout the development of the product or service. Unlike other approaches, here people are involved from the beginning to the end of the process, not only in a final evaluation phase.
• Design comes from people’s feedback: every prototype is evaluated by the people who will use it and, on the basis of their feedback, development takes the direction they suggest.
• The process is iterative: the phases of product development are not linear and do not take place only once. Feedback can lead to individual phases being repeated several times.
• Human-centered design does not aim only to make a product as simple as possible to use, but to guarantee a user experience that evokes positive emotions, offers solutions and encourages people to use the product again and again.
• The team working on the project must be multidisciplinary: user-centered design requires close collaboration between different disciplines. There is no place for a siloed approach in product development. Only by bringing together different kinds of expertise and different points of view can the customer’s perspective be implemented in the best possible way.

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What human-centered design means for us at Conflux: a practical example

Human-centered design is therefore, for us at Conflux, an approach that allows us to design solutions with the human component in first place.

We therefore consider the human perspective in every phase of the design process: from the earliest stages of observing human behaviour and identifying the problem, through the phases of analysis and concept development, to the development of the solution.

We concentrate on the needs and behaviours of the people who will use the product, applying the principles of ergonomics and our knowledge of the accessibility and usability of digital systems.

This typically happens in our projects that include a significant research phase.

As, for example, in a project we carried out for an important client of ours in e-health, which led us to the creation of an app that supports neurologists and people living with multiple sclerosis.

The project began with people: by listening to them. We spoke with them, listened to their stories, their needs, their necessities. We also spoke with people not directly involved but who provide support, such as nurses, caregivers and the most important foundations.

These accounts, gathered in interviews, become data that support the later phases.

Two workshops were organised that involved people living with multiple sclerosis directly, and people who matter in the field and who then followed the entire process of creating the app.

In these workshops, through the method of design thinking, we identified the fundamental elements to include in the app.
Taking into account all the data collected and the research carried out, we arrived at the design of two apps.

One app to help the neurologist in the management of the people they care for, to manage appointments and to check adherence to therapy, also usable by the nurses who assist them; and an app dedicated to people living with multiple sclerosis, to help them in the most critical moments of the illness and also to make routine actions easier, usable also by the person who takes care of them.

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The benefits of design centered on people

Using an approach of this kind brings considerable advantages to the person who will use the product, but also to the company that designed it.
First of all there is a notable contribution in terms of customer satisfaction: the more the product is in line with customers’ expectations, the greater the volumes of purchase and the satisfaction in using it will be.

The possibility of making mistakes decreases: the safety of the product developed comes from the fact that it has been designed according to the indications of the intended audience. The more this information is taken into account, the lower the possibility of making mistakes.
Thanks to the greater closeness between developers and the people who will use the product, greater empathy is also created in the development processes: more ethical and human products, attention to needs. What follows is a much higher perceived quality.

A further advantage lies in sustainability: because you do not start only from your own point of view (that of the developers), but from the opinion of a very wide group of people, it is reasonable to think of developing a product for a very wide audience, and therefore for a fairly wide market. In this sense, then, this approach contributes to the economic sustainability of the company.
In a model in which customer feedback is continuous, throughout the development phase, the costs of the changes to be made, step by step, are considerably contained, thus guaranteeing the economic efficiency of the design.

Lastly, this approach guarantees a competitive advantage, coming from the ability of the companies that use it — still few — to differentiate themselves from others that are not yet able to pursue these methods of developing products or services.

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Conclusions

The user-centered design or human-centered design model is establishing itself in the design of products and services: if it is true that the methods of implementation are not static and imply rapid change, the centrality of the person will remain an ever more fundamental direction in the years to come. It is not, after all, a contemporary trend, so much as a practice that has been established in the digital sector for some time and is destined to evolve.

At Conflux we have the experience needed to develop your project on the basis of the human-centered design method, thanks to a multidisciplinary team that can follow your project step by step.

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