What is Human Centered Design

This has been a year of learning for me. You’d think after a couple of decades leading and doing design, I’d have this figured out. 

My big realization this year? More than ever, it’s all about people. 

And while practices and practitioners like myself self-identify as user advocates, the reality is that in most businesses, UX is a passive agent. Its role is to enable other functions while trading the impact of its expertise for comfort.

Meanwhile we watch features ship that users don’t care about. Technology gets implemented that creates no value. Money is spent driving output. Attempts to connect effort to business outcomes are dodgy at best. 

Let’s be honest. That isn’t user-centered design. It would be more accurate to call it…

Stakeholder-centered design

Technology-centered design

Shareholder-centered design

Design-centered design (gasp!)


Why are we not pulling people in the design process more consistently? 

• Is it because it’s hard?
  (It’s not if you build systems)

• Is it because we are scared of what we’ll hear?
  (Users are generally kind and helpful) 

• Is it because it feels like it is slowing things down?
  (How much time and money is wasted building the wrong thing?)

That is what Human Centered Design is. A commitment to bringing people into the design process to discover what they like, what they don’t like, and what we can do to improve their lives through our product.

I get it. Everyone is spread thin. No one has margin for one more thing. If you can, add one of these small things:

1. Talk to a few users at the beginning of any new project
   (Even better, target 5-8)

2. Find user research from the past couple of years and put it in one place to access
   (Even better, use a GPT to pull past insights. We’re building a tool, talk to me if that would help you).

3. Take user feedback and create a bunch of How Might We’s. Socialize those together with leadership to expose them to new ideas
   (We build that into our user testing readouts; it segues nicely into design ideation).

Let’s do better business by being more human-centered.

Mike-

ps. Recruiting and scheduling users is the hardest and slowest part of the process for most businesses. We’re looking to pilot that as a managed service. Reach out for more info.