Human Centred Design (HCD)

HCD is all the rage with product designers at the moment.

The premise is simple: Put yourself in the shoes of your product’s end-user, and identify new ways to make their experience of your product more enjoyable, convenient, faster and easier.

Achieving innovation doesn’t always require substantive user-studies and copious research and analysis… stumbling across one simple, innocent, spontaneous user insight or experience may be all you need for your next major product breakthrough.

Loads of ideas don’t always make one great product… but just one great idea might.

So the key is to be open to new, unexpected ideas. They could come from anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Successful HCD focuses on:

1. People participation (be they users, client groups, manufacturers, suppliers and other critical stakeholders)
2. Developing simple and robust human-centred guidelines that assist in idea-selection and decision making
3. Generating ideas rapidly and in volume
4. Creating (fast and inexpensive) idea mockups and testing them with real people to get real feedback
5. Iteratively refining, improving and detailing the best ideas until the one killer solution (that meets all your People, Technical and Business requirements) is ready for launch.

HCD is all about showing empathy for all who come into contact with your product – anywhere along its lifecycle. The more empathy you can show for your customers, users and stakeholders, the more successful your product will be.

But wait… what is Activity-Centred Design?

Conversely, there is a field of thought that believes that HCD is not all it is cracked up to be.

“Activity-centred Design” (ACD) is thought by some to be superior to HCD, because of a belief that technology does not adapt to people, but people (have and always do) adapt to technology.

Don Norman discusses ACD vs HCD in some depth.

My conclusion from reading Norman’s essay is that if one needs to “learn” how to use a product, then the amount of learning required is directly proportional to that product’s lack of human-centredness!

By way of example, the guitar could be considered a dreadful piece of HCD (if indeed any HCD approach was taken at all) – and yet it is one of the most played and popular musical instruments in history. Significant amounts of time and effort must be invested to learn and master the guitar.

On the other hand, ACD focuses on the design of the technology / object with the view to optimising the hierarchical activities, tasks, actions and operations to improve usability, intuitiveness and in the case of the guitar, playability.

If you ignore a fundamental driver of HCD, that is, if you assume that your customers, end-users and other stakeholders do not really know what they want (even though they think & say they do), you may be able to identify new and improved features and functionality that SHOULD be included in your product in order for it to deliver it’s primary goals and benefits.

I think there is a place for both HCD and ACD in modern product development. Products that have had no human-centred consideration (and thus may be considered poor designs) can certainly benefit from HCD techniques.

Adopting an ACD approach may help you better define, understand and optimise how your product is made, assembled and operated… because in the end, it is the outcome of a product’s function that a user usually looks for, not the product or function itself.

Analogy: You don’t buy a drill bit because you want a drill-bit… you buy a drill bit because you need a hole.

Resources and links:

• Wikipedia definition of User-centred Design (aka HCD): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-centered_design
• Don Norman on ACD vs HCD: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/human-centered.html
• Tom Kelley (IDEO) discussing HCD (it’s from 2002, but it’s got some interesting insights): http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_kelley_on_human_centered_design.html