WHAT IS HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN?

"Empathy is the centerpiece of a human-centered design process. The Empathize mode is the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge. It is your effort to understand the way they do things and why, their physical and emotional needs, how they think about world, and what is meaningful to them. "1

The next step in the Human-Centered Design process is to define the problem. In this step, we narrowed our insights down to a series of themes, problem areas, and questions.

"The step is all about bringing clarity and focus to the design space. It is your chance, and responsibility, as a design thinker to define the challenge you are taking on, based on what you have learned about your user and about the context."2

We reframed our insights into How Might We questions, turning these challenges into opportunities for design. This format of question asking is crucial because it suggests that a solution is possible and because they offer you the chance to answer them in a variety of ways. "A properly framed How Might We doesn’t suggest a particular solution, but gives you the perfect frame for innovative thinking."3

"Ideate is the mode of the design process in which you concentrate on idea generation. Mentally it represents a process of “going wide” in terms of concepts and outcomes. Ideation provides both the fuel and also the source material for building prototypes and getting innovative solutions into the hands of your users." 4

A prototype is meant to convey an idea and answer a question. For human-centered designers, Rapid Prototyping is an incredibly effective way to make ideas tangible, to learn through making, and to quickly get key feedback from the people you’re designing for.

Because prototypes are meant only to convey an idea, we quickly moved through a variety of iterations. Rapid Prototyping allows us to build just enough to test our ideas, answer questions, and get the feedback we need.5