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Human Centered Design (HCD)

What Is It?

Human-Centered Design (HCD) is a practice that places paramount importance on crafting product decisions with a laser focus on the individuals who will ultimately interact with the products we create.

Rather than fixating solely on technological advancements or business challenges, HCD prioritizes a deep comprehension of the human element behind our products. It champions the exploration of user needs and pain points as foundational steps before even contemplating potential solutions.

Moreover, HCD underscores the indispensable involvement of users throughout the design process, allowing their invaluable insights to shape the trajectory of product development. By actively soliciting and integrating user feedback, HCD facilitates continuous refinement, ensuring that our solutions resonate authentically with users' experiences, ultimately fostering a harmonious synergy between problem and solution.

You’ll also hear “User-Centered Design” used interchangeably with “Human-Centered Design” and while those two can be synonymous, Rise8 believes the “human” element can get too easily lost in conversations when it gets replaced with “user”. We want to be relentless in reminding ourselves and others that our users are still humans at the end of the day and it’s vital we don’t lose sight of that understanding.

Why Do It?

Reduce Risk:

By involving users early and often in the design process, HCD helps mitigate the risk of building products or services that do not solve the right problems or solve them effectively. This can ultimately save time and resources by avoiding costly redesigns or product failures.

In addition, through practices such as usability testing- you can also uncover key usability flaws within your product or service that can be avoided through implementation of design mitigations.

Innovation & Competitive Advantage:

Organizations that prioritize HCD often gain a competitive advantage by delivering superior user experiences. That is, providing products and services that truly meet users' unmet needs can differentiate a solution from one that is built without much input from the humans who use it.

Reduced Need for Training:

By including users in the development process of your product or service you will, by default, have reduced the need for training as the system will be designed to be more user-friendly and intuitive.

Who’s Involved?

At Rise8 we believe that the full team should be thinking about Human-Centered Design. While Product Designers are accountable for ensuring that we’re effectively uncovering user needs, pain points and validating the relative effectiveness of solutions- all team members make decisions that will directly impact the humans who use our products. Some examples of how different roles on a team may play a part in the practice of human-centered design are listed below.

Product Design

Conducting discovery research (interviews, ethnographic research, surveys etc…) to uncover unmet needs, pain points & challenges. Developing & testing prototypes with users to understand the degree to which solutions meet the needs of the humans who use the product.

Product Management

Creating and prioritizing user stories that will unlock key value for customers. Creating a product strategy that aligns the needs of the business with the needs of the humans who use the product or service.

Engineering

Balancing technical implementation with key understanding of needs against complexity of implementation to inform priority. Deciding on technical implementations and architecture that enable end-users to accomplish their goals.

When To Do It?

Throughout the product development lifecycle! Human Centered design begins as soon as you kick off a project all the way through implementation, deployment and post launch!

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