A Human Centric Approach To Product & Service Development
Updated: Apr 7, 2019
Human-Centered Design Thinking is an approach that places people at the center of the development of products and services to improve business outcomes and create desirable experiences.
What is Human-Centered Design?
Simply stated, Human-Centered Design Thinking is an approach that places people at the center of the development of products and services to improve business outcomes and create desirable experiences. It is a method to humanize technology and interactions by deeply understanding how and why all stakeholders engage in a meaningful way.
The renown founder of the UCSD Design Lab, Don Norman, states, “Human-Centered Design is a framework for addressing complex issues at the intersection of people and technology, using evidence to guide continual refinement. It treats systems of people, organizations and technologies. It applies the findings of many fields, especially the cognitive, behavioral and social sciences through a process of doing and making, testing and probing, experimenting to make things better, working with specialists from relevant disciplines, as well as the people for whom the designs are intended.”
I am confused. There seems to be a lot of different names?
This framework is called by many names: Design Thinking, Human-Centered Design, and People-Centered Design. At its’ essence it is using creative problem solving tools that have been used by professional designers for years. People or Human-Centered Design can have a broader context than Design Thinking, as it includes the tangible part of developing the actual product or service design development - Design Thinking to Design Doing.
Why Should I Care?
Design has a long history, but it has often been hard to quantify its’ value. We have heard that approximately 20% of corporations have formally adopted Human-Centered Design Thinking as more and more evidence proves its’ value in our technology centric world. This includes Indexes in the US and the UK that have shown the increase in value of design centric organizations over the S&P.
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Some of the benefits are:
Improved adoption
Risk mitigation
Increased collaboration
Breakdown of silos
Cost efficiencies
Talent attraction & retention