No matter how innovative your idea is and how passionate you are about your startup, if you are not targeting the right customer/market then you might have to drop in the middle of your entrepreneurship journey.
Research on “The Top 12 Reasons Startups Fail” by CB Insights in 2021 showed that one of the topmost reasons for startup failure is due to ran out of cash/failed to raise new capital 38% followed by no market need as the second cause (35%).
Source: CB Insights
The above data shows the fact of how excited we get to jump into implementing our million-dollar idea without properly understanding our beneficiaries. Unfortunately, the reality of our million-dollar idea is not solving your customer’s problem.
But not to worry, this is where human-centered design plays a significant role in knowing and understanding people’s needs. In this article, we give the overall know-how about human-centered design (HCD), its stages, and why HCD matters.
HCD is a problem-solving approach. Its core is to keep humans at the center of your heart and focus on their needs. It’s a creative approach where you start designing things or products the target the need of the people and your new solution is designed in such a way that it meets the need of the people.
“It’s a process that starts with the people you’re designing for and ends with new solutions that are tailor-made to suit their needs. Human-centered design is all about building a deep empathy with the people you’re designing for; generating tonnes of ideas; building a bunch of prototypes; sharing what you’ve made with the people you’re designing for, and eventually putting your innovative new solution out in the world.” – IDEO’s DesignKit
HCD is an approach that can be used in any sector. It is all about your mindset. We always make a blunder of thinking that when we have to find a creative and innovative solution we need to design a product or a tangible thing. However, this is not what it is, your problem-solving approach can be a service or system as well.
Let’s break it down:
While thinking of products people usually think of fancy stuff. And yes that’s necessary as fancy stuff attracts people fast but do not forget your product must meet the need of people. While designing a product you need to think of resources, arrangements and come up with a new well-designed solution.
A service can have the desired result only if the need of the people are properly understood. You need to think deeply about what exactly the issues people are facing, what they want. But don’t limit yourself to their needs. You need to dig deeper and find out the limitations they face, what encourages them and what is crucial to them.
HCD is an approach that can be used in any sector, may it be for profit, not for profit, or administrative. It is all about understanding your mindset. If there is a lack of awareness in the community regarding the incentive provided by the local government then you can design something where you play the role of bridging the gap like a platform. Think! How might we design a new service engaging people and government where we can have an open conversation regarding problems a community is facing from A to Z?
Don’t forget sometimes the best solutions are always the simple ones.
There are three phases of HCD– inspiration, ideation, and implementation.
This is the first and one of the most important stages of HCD where you directly learn from the people. You interact with the people, observe them, involve yourself in their daily activities, and try to find out their needs. In simple language, it’s keeping yourself in their shoes.
Your overall goal at this stage is to understand the people. You need proper planning of what you are going to do in the future and what tools you are going to use to know people’s actual problems and their needs. If you manage to plan perfectly at this stage then the other two stages will be easy to implement.
One thing you can do to make things slightly easier to inspire is using various tools like interviews, observation, immersion, and research.
Observation
The good news is that from a very small age we learn to observe things around us. You observe people’s behavior and make a few judgments on the basis of that. But let me warn you, sometimes what you see might be different than reality. Don’t make your decisions on the basis of this, in fact, you can use your observation findings as some questions in the interview and research further.
Interview
Interacting with someone who you have never met before isn’t easy. While taking an interview with a target group it is important to make them feel comfortable to build a good relation with them. Make sure you have a list of questions to ask the participants which are relevant to the research you are doing. Don’t scare them by directly asking questions like what is your problem? How much do you earn? Why don’t you visit health facilities? etc. So, for this purpose good rapport building is essential.
Research
Research helps to provide evidence to your findings and clear your doubts. You can learn from people, learn from experts, and look for secondary information to develop your findings.
Immersion
It’s all about living and understanding the lives of the people you’re designing for. Putting yourself in their lives and places is the best way to comprehend people’s needs.
In this stage, you will gather all the information from your team, arrange the findings and pinpoint the opportunities for design.
Collecting all the information to coming up with an idea might be stressful. So, the advantage of working on a team is that you will have many ideas to play with, some you will keep, and others you’ll discard. If all your team has come up with one common solution then BINGO! you guys are on track but what if there is more than one idea that you want to implement. Here, brainstorming plays a very supportive role to decide on your solutions from tons of ideas and build a prototype.
Brainstorming helps you to come to a conclusion about a specific problem. Since here you have generated tons of ideas, through brainstorming techniques you can generate as many solutions as you want for the problem. In brainstorming the number of ideas is the first priority than quality. Remember no idea is a bad idea, just a bad decision.
Storyboarding is a simple concept to visualize your idea from start to finish. It is also well known as a scenario. You can draw a beautiful storyboard to the ugly one, the gist here is to focus on tasks, how they are related.
The idea is simple to draw with simple shapes, the experience, step by step by including the environment, the people involved, the motivations, including the whole thing that is part of the whole experience. StoryBoarding is most commonly used in service designs but not limited.
A prototype is a sample or model or a draft that is first prepared to check whether the solution seems to be possible or not. It gives you an opportunity to know whether it can be used by the people and make desired changes or not.
Testing is more about checking the prototype than the idea, checking whether the solution actually meets the target need or not. After you build your prototype share it with your user. While many believe that a prototype needs to be perfect before testing but the truth is that it’s always smart to evaluate market response at an early stage to not to lose time and effort.
Feedback is an acute phase in the Human-Centered Design process. Without understanding and knowing the feedback from your beneficiaries, you won’t know what changes are needed in your design. The case might be that your users do not like your product in such cases you need to either modify the idea or just go for another solution that you think might work. Therefore, this procedure on the ideation stage is in a cyclic order.
Here are a few pointers that will help to guide you through your ideation phase:
This is the final stage of HCD. After making necessary changes in your product on the basis of feedbacks and retesting it again, it’s time to implement. The implementation is bringing your product to life through various methods like marketing, building a partnership, polishing and upgrading your business model, performing a pilot test, and finally, your product is out.
Your product will definitely be a success since you have kept the people’s needs as your top priority and the people in the center of each stage.
The term human-centered design itself helps you to remind that humans need to be at the center. Whatever you design, remember who you are designing the product for.
Have you thought about why dropout is so common in a startup?
Because they are more focused to follow their instincts rather than reality and they develop something the market doesn’t need.
HCD helps you to recognize the real need of people who will use your product and get benefit from it.
Each stage of human-centered design – Inspiration, Ideation, and implementation helps you to work in a step-by-step manner from understanding the people to actually launching a product.
These three stages will help you to become;
You cannot solve all the problems but solving basic problems is essential since by doing this you’ll be trying to solve the root cause of many problems.
Knowing about the problem is very important and HCD helps you stand in the user’s shoes and think about their issues. Conducting the research helps you to identify the main problem, asking yourself questions like Who are you designing for? What are the problems?
A fashion designer always sketches their idea on canvas to see how their design looks like. Likewise, it is important to sketch your idea roughly or you can create a minimal viable prototype. But remember it doesn’t matter how much time you spend on ideating and prototyping your design solution, until and unless you test your designed product.
Even though you are the mind behind the solution DON’T FORGET YOU ARE NOT THE USER!
You will receive a lot of feedback during your product testing. This is important in HCD as this will help you to understand what part of your design requires improvements.
All successful industries are using HCD. The time to time survey is done to know what people want in their updated product or service.
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Sharmistha is an enthusiastic Public health graduate with years of experience in the field of research, data analysis, and report writing. She is a Hanyang University social change maker award winner. She also facilitates sessions for entrepreneurs and youth organizations.
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