- Design thinking focuses on the act
of making to explore possibilities,
going wide, open and unexpected.
But this exploration needs to be based
in some solid realities.
These include business and market realities and forecasts,
which many businesses are actually very good at.
But a distinguishing characteristic
of how designers approach understanding reality
is the emphasis on human empathy
and understanding the needs and wants
of the people who will use the product or service.
The human-centered design approach
puts people and their experience
at the center of product and service design,
and is grounded in continuous
structured interaction with those people.
In emphasizing the different types of people
who may experience what you create,
you're able to look at the problem
from their perspective and reframe
both the problem and solution.
As part of the human-centered design approach,
seek out opportunities to learn from people
who aren't in the core demographic
you expect to use your product and service.
Be open to seeing and hearing other viewpoints
to help inspire your solutions.
Your goal is to bring in ideas and insights
that help the team get of of their everyday,
run-of-the-mill thinking.
So for example, a Frog team has been working
with mobile operators around the developing world
to help them better understand rural, low-income farmers,
and develop services that would help them get
better information about pricing their crops.
In the beginning, the hypothesis was that
the middleman wouldn't be a trusted source of information
for these rural farmers,
and we knew that they were struggling
to get good, consistent pricing for their crops.
But during intercept interviews in a fruit market,
the team began to observe the rate-setting process
between farmer and middleman
and saw that a lot of valuable information
was being exchanged,
and a higher level of trust than expected was present.
So they expanded the research to speak to middlemen
and quickly learned that they want farmers to succeed,
because it helps their own business.
Discovering this win-win became an important part
of designing the final products and services
and making them relevant to the context of use.
Human-centered design blends well
with the iterative, human empathy focused
mindset of design thinking.
Experts in human-centered design methods
will tend to have a strong design research background
and the ability to communicate findings
in a way that inspires the team's empathy
with the people who'll use a product or service.
And you should seek to have
some of those experts on your team.
But this mindset that we do our best design
when we listen deeply and understand
the needs and realities of our end users
is one that everyone on the team should share.
Diving deep into these skills of design research
is beyond the scope of this overview course,
but Frog and GSMA have recently partnered
to launch a comprehensive toolkit at the URL below,
which I recommend as a great starter in this space,
even if rural farming is not your area of focus.
And there are other toolkits and courses
on design research available online,
and I've listed a few in the course resources.
At its heart, human-centered design
is about building empathy with
and understanding of the people
who will use what you create.
While keeping them at the heart of your work is a mindset,
there is a rich set of tools that support
keeping this awareness alive for your team
and building your toolkit will be helpful
as you move forward.
The three things to remember
about human-centered design are:
Put human empathy into practice
throughout the design and development
of products and services,
and focus on the breadth of humans
involved in a product or service, not just one user.
And always remember that this is a mindset
supported by a rich set of of skills
and tools that you can practice.
So as you think of your work today,
would you say that your work
or your workplace is human-centered?
And what is one step you might take
to help it be more human-centered?