Human-centered design: Business transformation that starts with people

Are you putting too much faith in data alone? Yes, data can tell you a lot about your customers’ and employees’ behavior. With today’s powerful data analytics tools, gathering and using data to build customer and employee experiences that respond to user desires and actions has become almost a given. But there’s still a piece of the puzzle that’s missing: The human piece.

Data can tell you “what” but not “why”

With all the advanced digital tools available, it’s easy to look to them for all the answers. But every business process is about user experience, i.e., people.

Here’s a nugget of truth to keep in mind: Data tells you what people do, but it doesn’t tell you why they do it. When it comes to customer and employee experiences, people are more complicated than we think.

Further, experiences don’t just happen in one digital space. They happen in multiple places that may be both digital and physical.

Business transformation is experience transformation

While your business may need digital solutions to achieve its objectives, those digital solutions ultimately all have users: customers, employees, vendors and partners. Yet it’s all too easy to jump straight to technology. A huge risk of doing this is that you may end up implementing a solution that your users don’t like and won’t use. You can have great digital tools, but if the experience is ”meh,” it doesn’t matter.

Business transformation, then, needs to start by looking at the broader business outcomes you’re trying to achieve, and all the human touchpoints involved in your processes. Rather than beginning with digital experience, you need to begin with people experience. And that’s where human-centered design (HCD) comes in.

Human-centered design begins with understanding people

We have tools that track user behavior. We can glean insights into how they are interacting and want to interact with processes, especially when they are interacting online. But that doesn’t tell us why they behave the way they do. And understanding why gives us a deeper, more accurate, more predictive view into how they want to interact with our business processes, products and services. People need to be understood because great experiences can’t be built without a deep understanding of the people they serve.

This discovery stage combines quantitative and qualitative research—all focused on understanding your customers and/or employees.  The quantitative data is necessary. But qualitative interviews and observations of the users themselves, in their environment, goes beyond the what they do and helps you know the why of their actions. The environment could be physical as well as digital, in a retail store, for example.

The result of this research is the ability to segment users by behavior rather than demographics, pain points and the other descriptors common to traditional personas.

What comes next?

Once the research is completed, a robust and agile HCD process will move to a design, test and prioritize stage and, finally, to solution delivery and ongoing refinement. The HCD process shouldn’t end with the initial implementation. It should be an agile process that continually learns more about your customers, your employees, your vendors and your partners. As you learn more and understand how they interact with your processes, products and services better, your experiences should continue to have new and more personalized and individualized experiences.

Sparking a total experience transformation

Human-centered design in action

Putting people at the center of design

HCD is as much a paradigm as a practice. It identifies and defines moments and how they are experienced by the people who will engage with the product, process or service. It puts people—not technology—at the center of the business. It provides that essential missing piece of the experience puzzle that can make your user experiences truly transformative.