Human-Centered Design (HCD) is an approach and mindset towards problem-solving focused on involving a human perspective at every step of the process. HCD aims to provide solutions for users who require it the most by understanding their needs and requirements and co-creating solutions through a participatory design approach.
We can categorize the HCD process into the three following fundamental stages:
The Observation stage is the first step of understanding the users and the challenge at hand. It is essential to clearly define the problem’s scope with the team before diving into user research at this initial stage. Once done, the team should conduct user research through interviews, field observations, focus groups, or immersion. The team should appropriately document all the data collected in the observation phase for later use. The data collected might include notes, interview transcripts, audio and video recordings, etc.
After conducting user research, the ideation stage generates ideas and design insights based on the data collected previously. The team should get together and brainstorm ideas. The ideas must be as creative and far apart from each other as possible to be converged and categorized into themes later. Once the team has narrowed down the ideas to 2-3 themes, they can represent them more concretely through storyboards or role-playing.
Once the team has formulated a concrete plan and idea for the product, it is time for implementation. It is always a good idea to make different prototypes first instead of developing the product straightaway. The most common technique is rapid prototyping, which is an iterative process. The team tests the prototype for usability and user satisfaction, and a new version is implemented based on the user’s feedback. The aim is to test and improve at each iteration.
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