What is Human-Centered Design?
Human-Centered Design (HCD) is an empathy-based, research-driven process that attempts to yield non-perscriptive designs for groups of individuals that share specific behaviours, traits, or conditions. HCD generates designs that usually take the form of products, systems, services or experiences, based on the specific perceived needs from the research phase of the HCD process. Below you can explore a basic structure for Human-Centered Design process, there are countless tools that can be used and added but I believe that this is a good starting point to map out a project.
Human-Centered Design Process
1. Empathize
The first step in the HCD process is to empathize with your user and the purpose of the project in general. Designers do this by working together with the users, process, or system in question to strengthen their personal understanding of the possible issues at hand.
2. Define
The “Define” phase of the HCD process designers are trying to establish questions that will help point the project in the right direction. This often takes the form of a question that begins with the words “How Might We” that considers both the complexity of the project but also leaves room for change to what has already been assumed about the project at this point.
3. Ideate
The ideation phase is a creative and methodical time where all of the information from the empathize step is filtered through our “How Might We” question in an effort to produce ideas that address the issues identified in the previous steps of the process.
4. Prototype
The prototype step is where the chosen ideas from the “Ideate” phase start to become real. Prototyping is a process whereby ideas are explored by creating quick, cheap and simple versions of the idea so that it can be understood by the target users and so that the conceptual purpose of the design can be tested.
5. Test
The “Test” phase of the HCD process is used to verify how well the prototype reflects the intended use and effects of the design. It is often here that the designer or team has to reconcile the assumptions that were made in the previous steps of the process. From this step it is customary to either begin a new cycle of the process with the new learnings or to revisit any of the steps to re-align the project with its purpose.