If there’s a secret sauce to successful product development, it’s human-centered design. To truly create anything with purpose, you must create with the end-user in mind. 

Human-centered design is an exploration of how to accurately and innovatively create a product or service that satisfies consumers’ wants and needs. You must first understand your customer in order to best serve them. The human-centered design process is dedicated to getting to know your target audience then creating products, processes, or experiences that are crafted from their perspective. 

In short, starting and ending with people helps you design products and services that your customers genuinely love. Now that’s good business. 

The following are three key reasons why human-centered design is a smart strategy to implement in your business today. 

3 Benefits of Human-Centered Design

1. Empathy-based

Now more than ever we have been made aware of the vital importance of seeing the world through others’ eyes. Considering other people’s perspectives is what empathy is all about. 

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from his angle as well as your own.” -Henry Ford

Empathy is the cornerstone of human-centered design. The best way to serve people is to get to know them. 

One of the most informative ways to gain customer perspective is via user interviews. Essentially, they are structured conversations with your audience about your product, service, or experience that you offer. It’s just like getting to know a new friend or partner better–through conversation, you learn their likes, dislikes, hopes, and needs. This information will help you design more desirable and meaningful experiences for your customers, creating a long-term relationship with them. 

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2. Encourages a learner’s mindset 

Seeing the world through the eyes of your customer also encourages you to approach challenges and innovation with a learner’s mindset. This expanded awareness opens you up to discover new possibilities, challenge biases, and think differently. For example, instead of being stunted by a setback, a learner’s perspective sees the challenge as an opportunity to grow and learn. You roll up your sleeves, sit and listen to the concerns of your target audience, and then tackle the obstacle with a creative solution.

Conversely, a fixed mindset keeps you stuck in one-directional thinking. You see failure as a limitation and throw in the towel, or you develop a product or service that doesn’t meet your customers’ needs at all. A fixed mindset can be judgemental and quick to categorize or place blame which blocks you from creative possibilities and maximum potential. Remember, being in authentic service of others is where we find the greatest success. 

Often our most profound ideas come from thinking outside the box, so allow yourself to. Approaching business with an open mindset allows you to guide your actions through optimism and curiosity; to choose a learner’s mindset is to choose a human-centric design approach to business. 

3. Drives ROI

Operating from human-centric design is indeed a better way to work, but it also directly translates to better business outcomes. A study from Forrester Research found that well established human-centered design has the potential to increase customer conversion rates up to 400%. Human-centered design is not just a competitive advantage, it is an essential asset to business success. 

Human-centered design also saves you time and money; it takes out the guesswork. Engage with your target audience throughout the entire product development process–the beginning, middle, and end–to get feedback on ideas and designs. You will know exactly what your customers like and dislike and make quick, appropriate changes to best serve the end-user. Without being in conversation with your customers, you are creating blindly. This can be a big money suck. 

Use a human-centric approach to pinpoint issues and respond to them before sinking design and development costs into your solution. 

“Human-centered design. Meeting people where they are and really taking their needs and feedback into account. When you let people participate in the design process, you find that they often have ingenious ideas about what would really help them. And it’s not a onetime thing; it’s an iterative process.” –Melinda Gates

Treat your target audience like the important people they are–ideate and create with them in mind to provide them with the best experience possible. Ask your customers what they want and use a human-centric design approach to deliver it.

Do you want to learn more about human-centered design?

Voltage Control facilitates design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Please reach out at info@voltagecontrol.com for a consultation.

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This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space.

Sydney native Jess Leitch is a designer based in London, currently working as the Head of Studio for Idean on the West Coast, based in San Fransisco. Her accoladed experience in business, product, and service strategy is expertly interwoven with detailed service and product design and backed by qualitative and quantitative research.

Jess has used this cross-section of skills to help companies set up service design teams from scratch as well as to launch new products, services, and businesses. She has published a guide on how to set up service design teams and spoken at prominent gatherings such as Design Thinking USA and the Service Design Network Conference in Dublin about launching new businesses and how to use design to increase the value of digital products.

Operational vs. Strategic Leadership

In 2015, Jess co-authored a highly-popular article on strategy+business outlining the ten principles of strategic leadership. It’s a guide to help companies develop and foster the growth of leaders who can effectively champion times of fundamental change within organizations. She continues to use this concept in her work today, which has helped many companies in their processes of innovation and transformation. According to Jess, many of the initiatives that are innovation- or digital transformation-driven are unsuccessful because there is a lack of truly strategic leadership to carry it through.

Strategic leadership differs from the traditionally-understood operational leadership, which most companies already have. Successful operational managers are those who operate in the context of running an operation—think: ensuring that costs are correct, targets are hit, and the status quo is maintained. The role of an operational manager is unquestionably vital to the success of any organization. The problem arises when such leaders are put in a transformational position that they are not equipped to handle effectively.

“There’s always a role for leadership, and quite often the people who are put in charge of [innovation] initiatives are operational leaders who’ve been successful in the context of an operation,” Jess says. “Then they’re put into these transformational roles, and they’re asked to think about what the future of the business is, and it’s never anything they’ve done before.” In other words, there is an entirely different set of skills required for leadership in leading innovation.

Enter, strategic leaders: people in positions of power with the know-how, experience, and confidence necessary to lead the company through a transformational change.

Enter, strategic leaders: people in positions of power with the know-how, experience, and confidence necessary to lead the company through a transformational change, which includes solving complex and bigger-picture problems. Identifying such leaders is the biggest challenge for companies because they often go unnoticed within an organization or are not allowed to grow into such roles.

Methods for seeking out potential strategic leaders, according to Jess, include:

1. Empowering people at all levels of the organization to act with authority
2. Allowing space for employees to think creatively and fail safely
3. Connecting like-minded individuals so that they may learn from one another
4. Creating time for productive reflection
5. Enabling open access to information for personal development

Without a doubt, strategic leadership (with the highest success rates found from promoting from within versus hiring from outside) is vital to the success of a business interested in pursuing innovation or transformation. The process of identifying strategic leadership can take time and be tedious, but companies are better set up for success to move forward with growth once appropriate leadership is in place.

Defining Innovation

At the heart of defining innovation is the question, “What are you trying to do?” Jess integrates the Dual Transformation Model to help clients address this question and identify the best type of innovation needed. The model is based on the idea that the skill set, processes, structures, and success metrics for innovation differ depending on the type and the terrain of innovation and innovation type.

“While you’re improving the everyday parts of the business, you also need to be thinking about what are the asteroids that are coming to hit you and how can you place additional bets that will make sure that you’re ready?” says Jess. “And to do those things is very different.”

“While you’re improving the everyday parts of the business, you also need to be thinking about what are the asteroids that are coming to hit you and how can you place additional bets that will make sure that you’re ready?”

The skillset required to focus on and improve daily business practices versus visualizing the future and potential setbacks of innovation require different tools, processes, structures, and governance. Once the goal of innovation is identified, the question of innovation or transformation can be addressed.

Innovation or Transformation?

One of the most critical and overlooked components of successful innovation is structure, according to Jess. “Structure plays a much bigger role than anyone wants to acknowledge,” she says. “The biggest thing that stands in the way of successful companies innovating is their existing success.”

When it comes to making an already existing business better, innovation is often an effective tactic. Innovation groups within a business can reach the horizons of innovation needed to make a positive improvement. “There’s always a really good role for innovation within the organization to make it better,” Jess says.

On the other hand, if a business is looking to transform, i.e. start a new business, create a separate bet, hedging, etc., structure must be addressed. Otherwise, even without the intention to, the transformation will be compared with the same metrics as the existing business, therefore not allowing the new idea a chance to evolve and stand on its own. Most successful initiatives are those that are separate from the existing structures, according to Jess.

A failure to evaluate structure within a transformation often leads to unavoidable obstacles in the form of regulations, scale, and technology. “That’s part of the reason why we try and fit transformations outside of the existing organization structure because of the tech stacks that you have to build on, otherwise sometimes it’s just easier to start from scratch.”

Many successful businesses see no reason or desire to do or try anything different than their working system because it’s working, Jess says. It isn’t until a wall is hit that a change of direction is brought to attention as a necessity. And this usually comes after years of turning a blind eye to sales figures that indicate a problem, because there is still accumulating revenue and the core business is still larger than any bets in progress.

Learner’s Perspective

One reason a company goes blind and doesn’t find success in the pursuit of growth is that it has limited awareness, which feeds its own biases. “You need a lot of different perspectives for you to be successfully innovative,” Jess says. There is a delicate balance between protecting ideas and gaining fresh insight from outside sources. It takes a sound method to identify unbiased solutions that do not yet exist open-mindedly.

In her past work at a consulting firm, Jess used the Ishikawa, or fishbone, method to consult clients and help them answer their “what” of intended innovation. In her opinion, this left clients worse off and with a more complicated situation. “I got sick of going into a new client with the presumption that we already had the solution, that we had an answer,” she said.

Since then, Jess has acquired the education and experience needed to have a broader perspective and a more effective method. Now, she denounces the Ishikawa method as a bias insertion tool. “It is this hypothesis tree where you use your own biases to come up with a solution,” she says. Instead, Jess was attracted to a design-centric approach, where no assumptions are made, and a knower’s mindset is replaced with a learner’s mindset.

This method is also backed by what Jess refers to as the “origins of consulting”, the original McKinsey idea built to share information between competitors without any negative implications for competitors. In other words, the best strategic approach is one where an answer is not assumed, and there is no pirating of competitors’ ideas.

The best strategic approach is one where an answer is not assumed, and there is no pirating of competitors’ ideas.

Adopting a learner’s perspective with an open mind, paired with integrated strategic leadership and particular attention to structure, helps people clearly define innovation and set themselves up for success. When asked how to measure innovation ultimately, Jess says it all depends on what a company’s goals are.

“If you don’t articulate how to innovate well, then you’re not going to sweat again to get results that you desire.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

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IDEO.org’s definition of human-centered design is elegant and concise: “Human-centered design sits at the intersection of empathy and creativity.” But, let’s unpack the phrase a little further. The first key to understanding the concept is right there: it’s about humans. People are the beginning, the end, and the constant North Star in human-centered design (HCD).

This means that any HCD business initiative or design project starts by considering the real-life end-users that the product, service, or experience will serve. “Who exactly will use our product?” (Tweens? Moms?) “What are those human’s needs, wants, and challenges?” (Lack of confidence? Limited time?) These are the questions that human-centered designers believe should form the foundation for all design decisions.

“Human-centered design sits at the intersection of empathy and creativity.” — from IDEO.org

While this might seem like simple common sense (and it certainly is), many companies are still just adopting this approach. It’s not the way organizations have historically operated. Budget constraints, long requirements lists, “the-way-we’ve-always-done-it,” and executive hunches can often be the engine behind decision making and how services and products are designed. It’s easy for teams to think they know how things should be and design in a bubble. They can lose sight of the humans who will be using their shiny widget.

What’s Human-Centered Design Training?

People who have experience with design thinking and human-centered design (also called user-centered design) are incredibly in-demand as today. That’s because many organizations have found that these problem-solving methods lead to actual business benefits. Thinking about your end-users is not only empathetic, but it’s also good business.

Thinking about your end-users is not only empathetic, it’s good business.

This interest in design thinking and human-centered design means that many organizations are bringing in experts to teach their teams some of the methods. So, if that happens to you, please don’t roll your eyes. The tenants of human-centered design are practical, actionable, and can be put to work in just about any professional scenario. If you’re going to engage in human-centered design training, here’s three key things you’ll learn.

3 Things You’ll Learn Through Human-Centered Design Training

1. Always Start with People

The first phase of any human-centered design project usually has similar qualities and activities. Often called the Inspiration, Exploration, or Discovery phase, the beginning of an HCD project begins with getting to know your people deeply.

The beginning of an HCD project begins with getting to know your people deeply.

So, let’s say you are designing a new app specifically for redheads. Task numero uno is going out into the field and talking to a diverse set of redheads — young and old, all genders, different backgrounds, different attitudes. As a human-centered designer, you want to know what makes redheads tick, what they love about their fabulous hair color, what they don’t like, and what features they might use on a redhead-specific app.

In addition to the qualitative research and user interviews that mark the beginning of a human-centered design project, your inspiration phase might also include observations and immersions into the places and products that your end-users might typically engage with.

The Inspiration Phase is about standing in other people’s shoes.

The point of talking to your end-users is to get away from your assumptions and desires. It’s about rooting your thinking in the day-to-day realities of the people you want to serve. This is all about building empathy and standing in other people’s shoes.

2. Bubble Up the Big Insights

After you’ve done a deep dive into the humans you’ll be designing for; it’s time to synthesize (or summarize) what you learned. Another thing that you learn in human-centered design training is how to formulate insights that help steer you into the right solutions. Insight is defined as “a deep understanding of a person or thing.”

“Insightful understanding is a powerful leaping-off point for great design.” — Jane Fulton Suri, IDEO Partner Emeritus & Executive Design Director

When we imagine teams that “do” design thinking or human-centered design, this insight-generating phase is what we often think of: it is that moment when you might be confronting a giant wall of sticky notes and trying to make sense of it all. That’s the critical distinction with HCD. You’re not generating a bunch of sticky notes to look smart or to decorate your wall. You’re looking to understand what your learnings mean and where they point you next.

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A vital part of the Inspiration and Ideation phases of an HCD project is understanding what all of your initial research and discovery is telling you. What are the significant insights you gleaned about your users? What are the top 5 things that you know to be true about redheads?

These insights are some fundamental truths about your end-users that help you know which direction to go in your design.

You’ll slowly, but surely, crystalize these insights by creating groups, themes, and buckets of ideas you heard from your users. These insights are some fundamental truths about your end-users that help you know which direction to go in your design.

3. The Power of Prototypes

The third thing you’ll learn if you go through human-centered design training is the importance of prototyping. The term prototype can be confusing if it’s new to you. A prototype is a simulation of your final product that you create so you can test and learn from it. Prototypes can be something very “high fidelity” or something that appears very close to the real thing— like a mock-up of an app or landing page — or as simple as a loose sketch or illustration.

HCD prioritizes prototyping because, again, it’s all about the users. By creating a quick prototype, you can show it to your ideal users and get feedback. It’s common sense, but many companies have been accustomed to toiling for months or years to make a product “perfect.” They push it out into the world and only then find out what people think. Prototyping lets you get that crucial feedback from customers early and often.

The idea behind prototyping is to move quickly, build something simple. Then you show it to people, find out how they react— what’s confusing? what’s exciting? what could be better? The thinking is that you’ll get to a better product faster and save time. (Plus, there are a ton of prototyping tools out there today that make it easier than ever.)

Are You Looking for Human-Centered Design Training or Design Thinking Training?

Voltage Control facilitates hands-on workshops and coaching that builds your team’s innovation and facilitation skills. We also host events of all kinds, including design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Please reach out to info@voltagecontrol.com for a consultation.

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