Putting people first: Human-Centred Design (HCD) Explained
Senior Consultant, Avrithi Misthry, outlines how HCD can be used to create better buy-in within organisations.
Firstly, what is Human-Centred Design?
“The discipline of developing solutions in the service of people”.
Human-Centred Design (HCD) is an approach to problem-solving that puts the people you are designing for at the heart of the process. The Human-Centred Design process begins with empathy for who you’re designing for and ends with solutions that are tailored to suit their needs.
The HCD method is driven by three key design skills to “make things better”. These are looking, understanding, and making:
- Looking – Innovation begins and ends with people. It calls for keen and caring observation.
- Understanding – Innovation is not a lightbulb moment of genius. It calls for deep understanding and rigorous discernment.
- Making – Innovation puts great ideas into action. It calls for making things happen in a resourceful and resonant manner.
HCD is a practice where feedback is a critical part of how the solution evolves. By continually refining and improving the way you work, you can discover the root causes of problems, exercise creativity, and arrive more quickly at fitting solutions.
Applying HCD:
Human-Centred Design is a flexible approach that can be applied to almost any situation; here are a few ways it can be applied:
- Agile delivery – HCD is a great tool to enable Agile teams to work more efficiently and effectively. It can be used in sprint retrospectives to allow team members to celebrate achievements and identify areas of opportunity. HCD can also enable Scrum teams to identify ongoing continuous learning and development opportunities.
- Business improvement – HCD can be used to approach improvements to design and business analysis. It allows Designers and BA’s to work with stakeholders to identify areas of opportunity by understanding the day-to-day pain points.
- Strategy development – the Human-Centred Design approach incorporates the experiences of a wider group of stakeholders to work on a vision that is truly theirs. As a result, everyone has the opportunity contribute positively to the future of their organisation.
Human-Centred Design at 2PM
Through adopting a co-creation approach, we help to enable and guide you to achieve your vision. This approach sets the stage for the culture necessary to help organisations realise their desired outcome.
Services like our Plan on a Page and LEGO Serious Play workshops support the HCD approach, encouraging better problem-solving and collaboration. If you think your business or organisation could benefit from a HCD approach we’d love to chat to you more about it over a coffee.