Did you ever feel that a digital product you were using was designed for you? Most likely, its creation was guided by the principles of human-centered design. This approach prioritizes human demands, feelings, and emotions to deliver simple and enjoyable experiences.
Even the best product idea can fail if the design doesn't focus on real people. Digital solutions and services that don't meet user needs are unlikely to succeed. Therefore, HCD is essential for companies that truly want to resonate with their target audience.
We have already posted an article with human-centered design examples. Now, we explore the main principles, review the pros and cons, and outline the HCD design process that drives impactful results. Keep on reading to uncover Arounda’s expert highlights and tips.
What is Human-Centered Design?
Human-centered design (HCD) is an iterative process that puts target users first. It takes design specialists to observe, engage, and empathize to get valuable insight into customers' expectations, preferences, and pain points. By placing users at the core of the process, they can design functional, easy, and pleasant solutions.
HCD is a problem-solving strategy widely used in product design, software development, and service to create effective, user-friendly solutions.
How Human-Centered Design Differs From Traditional Design Thinking
Human-centered design techniques and traditional design thinking are grounded in empathy, collaboration, and iteration to ensure engaging and intuitive user experiences. The two concepts are not the same. Each represents a slightly different approach to creative problem-solving in design.
Design thinking drives innovation by balancing user needs, technical feasibility, and business goals. It helps to solve complex problems with new, out-of-the-box ideas. Assumptions, prototyping, and testing typically drive traditional design thinking.
Human centered design methods put usability, accessibility, and real-life experiences first. They rely on user feedback and data and are commonly used to develop solutions tailored to a wide user base.
You can use both approaches simultaneously to make the most out of digital design. Traditional design thinking initiates innovative ideas, and HCD ensures the ideas are relevant to the end-users.
The Four Core Principles of Human-Centered Design
The key human-centered design principles lay the foundation for appealing, responsive, easy-to-use digital products that meet real-world needs and expectations. So, what are they?
Understand and address the core problems
HCD is all about identifying and addressing fundamental issues. For this, you must research real-world practice instead of focusing on surface symptoms.
Take time to understand a user's problem, then ask, "Why did it happen?" multiple times to find the reason. Such core issues include a poor understanding of the system's complexity, incorrect resource allocation, interaction patterns, or disruptions in the work environment.
Be people-centered
HCD methods put user needs, values, and motivations over advanced technological features. This approach recognizes that technology should make users’ lives easier, help them solve their problems, and achieve their goals.
User-centered products and services require a strong understanding of the broader context (people's history, culture, beliefs, and environment). These factors directly impact individual behaviors and preferences.
We don’t guess who your users are; we build detailed personas based on real research to understand their goals, pain points, and behavior. Here’s an example of how our design team did it for our SaaS AI project, MOJO-CX.
Use an activity-centered systems approach
Every system consists of numerous elements that must work together to achieve a specific goal. Designers and developers must understand how these components interact to create more efficient strategies. Consider the whole system as a unit, and don’t focus on each element in isolation.
What do you want your users to achieve with your product? Once you have the answer, build a cohesive process to guide them toward that objective.
Use rapid iterations of prototyping and testing
Implementing HCD involves generating ideas, testing them, collecting feedback, and refining them in iterations. This process takes patience and persistence, trying different approaches, rethinking them, and repeating until a flawless outcome is achieved. Each iteration and test upgrades the initial idea and takes your team closer to the final result that fully matches the target audience’s expectations.
Human-Centered Design Process: From Insight to Impact
Like any other part of digital product creation, human-centered design has a structured process with key phrases. And just like many other processes, this one isn’t linear. Fresh insights or new challenges arise during each iteration, enabling the team to adapt to fluctuating requirements systematically. However, each cycle improves your product and brings you closer to what your users want. No idea is perfect initially! It needs time and effort to evolve into something unique and distinctive.
Each team might follow a slightly different process of human-centered design. Based on our experience, we identified the most effective structure that helps us deliver outstanding, truly user-focused design solutions.
Below, explore the Arounda team’s HCD process step by step.
Phase 1: Empathize
Begin with comprehensive user-centric research to better understand the audience you’re designing for and their needs, preferences, and challenges. Talk to experts, observe users in context, and even try to immerse yourself in their environment. All this helps create a complete picture and inform the following decisions and design choices. You have to look at the problem from the user’s perspective, empathize, and move beyond your assumptions to uncover real, meaningful insights that guide the development of effective, human-centered solutions.
Phase 2: Define
Now, it’s time to analyze the information gathered during the previous phase and make the problem statement human-like. This means describing it from the user’s point of view, not just your personal or company’s wants and ambitions.
With a complete understanding of the problem, teams collect ideas and define features, functions, and other product elements to offer users the desired solution.
Phase 3: Ideate
By this point, you have a strong understanding of users and clearly defined challenges. Now, the creative work starts. Look at the problem from new perspectives.
During the ideation stage, the Arounda team brainstorms, sketches, and prototypes to explore a wide range of possible solutions for the problem. We generate as many innovative and smart ideas as possible without judgment or limitations. Later, our team narrowed down these ideas and chose the best concepts for further development.
We recommend using different techniques like Brainstorming, Brainwriting, Worst Possible Idea, or scampering to push thinking outside the box and generate surprising ideas.
Let’s take a look at one of our Web3 design examples, Astra, where our team created wireframes before moving to the next step.
Phase 4: Prototype
All the previously generated and collected ideas are finally taking shape at this stage. You can move on to prototypes - simple, inexpensive versions of the product or its key features. Depending on the testing requirements, these can be anything from paper sketches to basic digital mockups.
The main objective during this phase is to visualize how different ideas will work in the real-world environment.
Team members, other departments, or a small group of users test these early versions for feedback. It will drive the following improvements or define ideas that no longer feel relevant.
This is rather an experimental phase, which is necessary to help you see what solutions are most effective, what unaddressed challenges remain, and how users might actually use the final product.
Phase 5: Test
This phase involves thorough product testing with the best solutions from the prototyping stage. The main objective is to evaluate how well the solutions work for real users.
Testing means moving closer to the final; it can still reveal new insights. So, teams go back to previous steps to make refinements. This iterative approach allows adding as many adjustments as needed until the product meets user needs and performs well in real-life scenarios.
Phase 6: Implement
After making iterative refinements through all the previous stages, based on testing and real-world feedback, the team can move on to the implementation phase. Here, a user-centered, high-fidelity design enters the market with a competitive marketing strategy.
Let’s return to our Astra example and see the final web design.
The work doesn’t stop after the release. It continues with ongoing monitoring and updates. We recommend regular feedback analysis, behavior tracking, and timely improvements based on real-world insights to keep the product up-to-date and responsive to evolving needs.
Real-World Applications of Human-Centered Design
Fitbit
The Fitbit app gives users a broad picture of their health and fitness journeys. Its wearables and app serve various needs, helping people manage their physical activity, sleep, diet, and even stress.
Key features like step counting, sleep tracking, and health metrics monitoring make Fitbit a health advisor that fits in one’s pocket.
The app provides actionable insights and reports in a simple format and makes complex data understandable for users. The solution also adapts to diverse fitness goals and assists users in achieving them, ensuring highly personalized experiences.
Fitbit has over 120 million registered users and is a successful health and fitness mobile app. It motivates them to stick to their sports schedule, encourages the adoption of healthy habits, and even helps identify health issues early.
Slack
Slack is a team collaboration tool that brings human-centered design to workplace communication. It's streamlined, effective, and fun. The platform addresses the problem of missing social cues or misinterpreting messages in written communications with emojis, status updates, and community channels. It also allows teams to create custom emojis to make work messages more interactive.
With public channels and threads, Slack simplifies workflows and makes important information easily accessible. Every team member can ask questions or share updates all in one place. And its reminder functionality ensures that no one skips important meetings, messages, and tasks.
ChatGPT
Instead of meeting new users with an empty screen and no direction, which can make them feel lost, ChatGPT follows a supportive approach. It immediately presents helpful information and quick tips for beginners. The artificial intelligence chatbot provides a friendly and straightforward guide to help people get started easily.
From the first click, users learn what ChatGPT can (and can’t) do, along with clear examples of how to interact with it and gain maximum results. This well-structured onboarding helps people work with the service more confidently.
Notion
Notion is an online organizational tool that allows users to keep all their projects, goals, calendars, and roadmaps in one place according to their specific individual or team’s workflows.
The platform moves away from time-consuming and tedious generic onboarding. Instead, based on collected user data, it gives tailored recommendations and ensures the most relevant experiences. Whether you use Notion for team collaboration, individual work, or studying, the tool will provide prompts that perfectly fit your goals.
Its effective UI feedback, which features progress indicators, error messages, and acknowledgment notifications, builds trust by responding to users' actions and providing necessary guidance.
Benefits of Using Human-Centered Design
Adopting the human-centered design approach means putting a real user at the core of every design choice, considering their context and existing needs. Products built on a designer’s assumptions and guesswork might fail to address the target audience’s pain points. Instead, user-focused solutions are supported by real-world behaviors and feedback. This strategy leads to smarter products and benefits both design teams and users.
Below, we’ve collected the most prominent advantages of HCD.
Enhanced User Satisfaction
How to create solutions that are easy to interact with, relevant, and engaging? Focus on real user needs, wishes, and challenges from the beginning.
This process also requires considering different audiences, including those with disabilities, to create truly accessible and inclusive products. The goal is to offer a quick and straightforward solution—users don’t want to waste time figuring out how an app works.
If the product delights and helps users, they are more likely to adopt and recommend it. This ultimately means increased satisfaction rates and fosters long-lasting relationships with customers.
Our team provided user-centered web design solutions for the healthcare project, Smoothline. Let’s look at the result.
But that’s only the beginning. We have more great human centered design examples of our work.
Reduced Risk of Product Failure
Involve end users in the design process from early stages, collect their feedback, and use it to make well-informed decisions. This is how you can identify and address issues early before they escalate into costly problems. Continuously testing ideas and improving at every step lowers the chances of launching a product that misses the mark.
Faster Iteration, Smarter Innovation
The HCD process encourages iterations and smart innovation. It helps go beyond conventional methods and explore fresh perspectives. The result? Creative solutions to complex problems grounded in real-world needs.
Challenges of Implementing Human-Centered Design
The benefits of human-centered design encourage more companies to use this approach. But its implementation presents several difficulties you can acknowledge in advance. Let's take a look.
Resistance to Change
Adopting an HCD approach requires a cultural shift within an organization. Some stakeholders may resist change and miss the value of involving end-users in the design process. It can lead to a lack of buy-in and support, undermining the success.
Limited Understanding of User Needs
Designers must deeply understand their target audience to design solutions that meet user needs effectively. But it can be difficult to get such info (especially if the user group is diverse or hard to reach).
Designing for the Average User
The previous point leads to this one. If you haven't done enough in-depth audience research and have created a portrait of the average user, then using HCD can be risky.
The average customer is often seen as a generalized representation of users that does not cover their diverse needs and experiences. It can result in solutions that work well for some users but fail to meet the needs of others.
Time Constraints
The HCD process can be time-consuming, and some organizations may need more time to implement the approach fully. It can result in limited user research or testing, which can compromise the effectiveness of the final solution.
Great ideas deserve great execution.
If your product feels clunky or your users drop off too soon, human-centered design might be your missing link. Let’s fix that! Learn more about our user-centered UI/UX design services.
Put in Place Human-Centered Design With Arounda
Human-centered design and development are valuable for improving customer acquisition and retention. Following the four key principles highlighted in this article, companies can launch competitive digital products and stand out in crowded markets.
At Arounda, we have proven experience in creating compelling human-centered designs. Over the 9 years, we have worked with clients across industries, including startups, small businesses, and medium-sized enterprises.
If you want to develop your next product according to the HCD principles, our team is here to help.
