Human Centered Design

As my company continues to make a larger pushes towards Design Thinking within our projects, it makes sense to take a moment and better understand in broad context what human-centered design thinking entails.

Developed and refined by the Stanford d.school, the concept of human-centered design calls for three fundamental steps: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. The inspiration phase is the chance to culturally immerse ourselves in research participants’ environments to better understand their wants, needs, and desires. In that same fashion, the ideation phase helps us draw lessons learned from participants to explore creative, outside-the-box, solutions by co-creating prototypes that are culturally aligned with their vision and ideals. This sets the stage to the implementation phase, where solutions are adopted and shared with the general public for feedback and review.

In summary, one needs to adopt empathy and a curious attitude towards users by asking the right questions to get the wheel of human-centered design moving. By better understanding our users, we can better create real solutions to meet the users' needs and improve the quality of our designs.