Human-centered design is an approach that puts the users or the people you are trying to serve at the center of design and innovation (for products and services). The goal is to build products or services that will benefit those who they are intended for. For this reason, organizations are fostering this culture and way of thinking within their teams. Now, it’s time to examine how it impacts the way you set your business objectives.
What is Human-Centered Design (HCD)?
First, it is important to define what a human-centered design is all about. Essentially, it is when you embrace any problem as something that you can provide a solution for. In fact, you use these problems as a driving force behind developing useful and usable products and services. Adopting this way of thinking will help you formulate new ideas that can help you build innovative solutions that are rooted in the actual needs of the people.
By focusing on human-centered design, you have the power to create real impact in the lives of the people you are serving. However, human-centered design is not mere problem-solving – although it might appear that way. Instead, product designers with this mindset are innovators, learners, and experimenters. They seek inspiration in unexpected places. Dreaming up lots of ideas is not the end – they have to test them and refine them.
With that said, the HCD methods are not exactly linear. They have their own contours and characters because every idea or problem is unique. The HCD method does follow three important steps though: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation.
Inspiration
This phase involves understanding the people you want to develop products for. Your ability to develop empathy is a result of observing their lives and knowing about their desires and needs. Through this, you can identify their problems and needs and formulate ways to address them.
Ideation
In this next phase, you make sense of whatever information you managed to gather from the initial phase. This is also where you organize your ideas and come up with potential solutions. With this idea, you must test and refine these ideas to make them tangible.
Implementation
This is the final phase in the HCD method – turning your ideas into reality. You must outline the steps on how you can turn your idea into a tangible product or service and how to market it to create real impact for the people who will use them.
What is a Good Objective?
All organizations must define an objective. It helps you work toward something and to map out the actionable steps needed to get there. However, not all objectives are the same. A good objective must build alignment and accountability while also fostering autonomy among the people who make up your organization.
A good objective must be able to communicate what you are doing and the purpose behind it. It should be clear to all members of your team what you are doing and why. However, an objective should not be prescriptive; it isn’t a to-do list. When you take on the latter approach, you lose sight of the reason behind what you are doing.
A good objective should also be adaptable. It should not be fixed because the conditions in which you are doing things can change at a moment’s notice. New trends or opportunities might emerge that require a revamped approach.
Take this for example:
Bad objective: “Increase traffic to website by 30% by the end of the last quarter of the year”
Good objective: “Improve accessibility and loading times of website pages to boost traffic by 30%”
As you can see, a good objective should be clear and specific. It does not just tell you what to aim for but also communicates what must be done to achieve it. Moreover, it should be ambitious yet attainable. It must also clearly state the desired outcome (which in itself should be measurable).
How to Write a Good Objective
Now that you understand the concept of a good objective, the next obvious question is this: how do you write a good objective?
Objectives are important as they give your team a sense of direction and focus. With that said, here are some questions that you can ask yourself when formulating a good objective:
- What problems require a solution? What are the possible solutions for those?
- What is stopping you from implementing the solution to that problem? Is there a way to overcome it/them?
- What must be done to improve results?
- Is the timeline for the objective realistic enough? Is it achievable?
Make sure your objective is inspirational; it should give your team something to strive for. It should also be actionable with a defined time frame. And lastly, a good objective must add value to your business. In doing so, your objective should challenge the team; it shouldn’t be easy or else there would be no room for growth and development.
How to Connect Objectives with HCD Methods
The whole idea of a human-centered design is that the user need not change their behavior or expectations to fit the product. This is why it is important to follow the principles of a good objective when implementing the HCD methods to create better products.
In the Inspiration phase, you need to define the objective of the product development process. In this case, an objective is not just about making the lives of your customers easier and better, but how to achieve this? For example, you want to develop a product, tool, or technology that improves the safety of its user or lets them do things more efficiently.
In the Ideation phase, you must set objectives on how you can measure and assess the usability of the product using measurable and actionable data. Your objective is to determine if the product is indeed plausible and if it serves the purpose that you designed.
And lastly, the Implementation process also benefits from setting a good objective. This is where you identify the time frame for the creation of a prototype and formulate a strategy on how you can market this product to your target users.
