Human-centred design and design thinking in emerging tech

What happened is that the team is looking at the problem and solution from their own unique perspective. They surround themselves with a group of likeminded people that is validating the idea and specific solution.

But the ambition of the project is to be used by a broad audience early on. With the growing number of potential users, the perspectives and references with which people are looking at both problem and solution are growing as well. The solution however might not take all these viewpoints into account. Here is a little graphic to illustrate this dilemma:

In order to understand the different perspectives of users, it is important to understand their differences in reference. There are a lot of factors that make people look at or experience things in a different way. Here are just a few of them:

In short, the daughter of a doctor that grew up in India and went on the study and live in the UK will look at problems in a uniquely different way than the son of a farmer in Texas that lives close to his family and has the ambition to take over the family business. Are both perspectives relevant? If both are potential users, the answer is yes.

When the product or service contradicts a behaviour that they have already established.

Changing behavioural patterns is something that takes a lot of time and effort. It is also something that can only be done by thoroughly understanding the behaviour in the first place. Again, the kinds of behaviours we engage in on daily basis are strongly related to our personal differentiators and to where we live.

Because using new technologies is often all about disruption of existing behaviours. And yes, even if the aim is to make things easier. But what if we are used to the complicated processes?

What if the behaviour is so deeply engrained in our life that we don’t even think about it anymore?

People might tell you that your product is a great idea, but they don’t end up using it. Are they just being nice but don’t really like it? Are they lying? Maybe. But they might also just not be aware of their own behavioural patterns.

A lot of our actions are determined by our unconscious mind. This makes gathering user feedback even more difficult, as you can’t even trust all the things that people tell you they would do. In this case, actions really speak louder than words. So how to get insights on what people will actually do with your product or service?

The best way to overcome this dilemma is to integrate your users into your processes early on. The earlier you integrate users into product definition and development, the more attractive your products and services are going to be later on.

So how to do that?

There are two steps I want to introduce: The first step is to identify and get to know your users early on. The second step is to work with human-centred design and agile development. This step helps to integrate user insights and feedback into every aspect of the development process.

As a first step, it is really important to understand who your users are. The first part of that is often defining who you think they are – the next step is to validate your assumptions with actual users.

My favorite tool: Persona Map

Why is it great? Because it lets you think of your users as actual people you get to know. Give them a name, get to know them, consider them as friends and think about whether they would approve new developments at every step of the way.

• Reach out to people in your network

You might already know people that qualify as different types of users. Talk to them! Get to know them and fill out your persona template with a real person in mind.

• Bring diversity into your team

The best way to bring diverse perspectives into your team? Hire them. There is no easier way to achieve initial validation on a broader level than to have a diverse group of people develop ideas in the first place.

In order to really build user-centricity into your product definition and development processes, it is best to integrate human-centred design at the core of your processes. One very established and known method to do this is to work with Design Thinking.

The Design Thinking process works a little bit different whether you are initially defining or improving a product or service. In the first case, you are looking to make your solution specific to your customer needs and integrated into their daily life. In the second case, you want to test and improve an already existing product or service. You might let your users use what you have, then think about improvements you can quickly test with them. Overall, you will go through the same process steps:

In the first phase of the Design Thinking process, you want to go a bit further than understanding who your customers are. You want to understand why they do the things they do, what motivates them, and what problems they are facing on a daily level. This step ideally includes both interaction and observation.

In this step, you compare insights, group your observations and identify patterns, and clearly define the problems you need to solve.

What are the best ways to overcome the problems you identified? You want to be as broad and open as possible in taking different solution perspectives into account. Nothing is too crazy or impossible in the first stage. Once you have gathered enough ideas, group them and select the ones that seem best tailored to overcome the problem. Specify those as much as possible.

For brainstorming we usually use Mural as a whiteboard for online group sessions and Milanote to collect and organise the ideas generated.

Prototyping is cumbersome and a lot of work. Does that need to be the case? Can you find some ways to make your idea specific and open for feedback without spending a lot of effort? In Design Thinking, creativity is key. You can draw out your solution, record it as a video, or build it in prototyping tools like InVision. The easier and faster you can bring your prototype into the hands of actual users, the better.

Now it is time to gather feedback. Show your prototype to potential users, and let them experiment with it. Listen to what users have to say, and observe how they interact with your prototype!

Did your test indicate that users are happy with your idea or improvement? Perfect. You are now ready to turn it into an actual product or update. Did you get mixed or negative feedback? No problem – you did not waste a lot of time and money yet. You might need to go back to your brainstorm ideas and follow another path, or update and redefine the problem you were trying to solve with your new insights.

Design Thinking and its iterative nature fits perfectly with agile development processes. In more detail, the first time you would cycle through a Design Thinking process is in your early product definition.

The outcome of this first cycle (or more than one if you need to repeat) is a tested easy prototype of your product or service. You can transform user insights and feedback into user stories for your backlog.

Throughout the development process, you can add iterations to define and test improvements or new features.