Is it just a buzzword? Does it have any unique value or meaning? We believe it’s a new and important way of thinking about design and we’ll explain what we believe constitutes human-centred design, along with example design methodologies we apply religiously.
User-Centred Design is a relic of the past.
We’ve been hearing of user-centred and customer-centred approaches for a while in UX and marketing. While it’s all good to design experiences for the user or customer – both for the customer and the company themselves – it is a rather limited view of the process. User-Centred Design is a relic of the past.
The user and the customer are human. There’s an independent human who does things before becoming a user and they remain a human after they stop becoming a user. So when you design a user flow with the mindset that the user just appears in the flow and then leaves the flow, you’re limiting the considerations that even before the user enters the flow, they have certain motives, desires, and expectations.
This, in a nutshell, is what we believe encapsulates Human-Centred Design. It’s an idea that you’re designing for a human instead of a user. How we at Ameliate ensure that we’re meeting the human needs behind the user needs is by three methodologies.
Dilemma-Based Design
At University of Twente, there was a professor who had developed a method for designing experiences that account for the internal dilemmas people have. By accounting for these dilemmas, we provide a deeper and more meaningful experience for the people using technology.
The designer could force the person to choose one option or perhaps try to integrate the two in the design.
For example, in dating apps people may feel the need to keep their information private but also feel like they want to learn about another person as much as they can. These are obviously in conflict with each other, since nobody can learn anything of anyone, if nobody wants to share anything about themselves. For the designer, this poses a challenge of how to resolve this dilemma. The designer could force the person to choose one option or perhaps try to integrate the two in the design.
We uncover these dilemmas by paying attention to the emotions people display while using applications. This can be done in an interview setting by a human observer or in the case of Ameliate, by AI-powered Emotion Recognition software. These emotions then act as a base for identifying dilemmas.
Instrumental Interactions
Instrumental Interactions are a framework developed by two professors at Université Paris-Saclay. Within it, lies the idea that people enjoy interacting technology more when it’s instrumentalised into tools as opposed to clicking and tapping on one-use commands. This process of instrumentalising has been dubbed reification and it answers to the question “is this interaction reified into an instrument or is it a command?”
Can you imagine that instead of scrolling on a website, you would have to click a small downwards-pointing arrow to move a little bit further down, sending the “Go down” command to the application?
A classic example of reifying commands into an instrument is the scrollbar. Can you imagine that instead of scrolling on a website, you would have to click a small downwards-pointing arrow to move a little bit further down, sending the “Go down” command to the application? At the moment it seems obvious that there was an easier way to do it. However, there are tons of commands that still remain in a “non-reified” state. They could be turned into more satisfying instruments of interaction.
For designers it remains a challenge of how exactly do we instrumentalise these monotonous and unsatisfying commands into something that people would feel natural to interact with? Now, it’s a difficult task of course. We at Ameliate spent hundreds of hours practicing the essentials of these frameworks and can safely say we’ve got a solid grasp on the topic. We believe the opportunities for instrumental interactions lie especially in virtual reality and mobile interactions.
Participatory Design
However, the designer has to remember that they’re not designing for themselves – they’re designing for the person who ends up using the product or services.
Participatory design is a way of working where the designer takes the end user along for the entire design lifecycle, effectively learning who the end user is and giving a platform for the end user to affect the design decisions. This might feel intimidating for the designer. Designers are proud of their work and essentially they’re inviting a layperson to design with them. However, the designer has to remember that they’re not designing for themselves – they’re designing for the person who ends up using the product or services.
Another innovative factor of participatory design is that it is generative, not evaluative. The process generates new approaches continuously through rapid iterations and takes into account breakdowns instead of imagining a “perfect interaction”. One of our experts at Ameliate is a particularly talented facilitator for participatory design workshops and we often employ these ideas in design work of our own products as well.
Hope this gave you a better understanding of Human-Centred Design and if you’d like to learn more, utilise our expertise, or hire us for your next project, don’t hesitate to drop a line at hello@ameliate.com!