It’s impossible to succeed, unless you learn how to develop products and services people actually need and want to use. For this purpose, you should be able to validate your ideas, identify the demands and expectations of the target audience and craft an effective value proposition. How to do it? This is when the human centered design comes into play. What is it? What are its principles, and why is it worth embracing it in your strategy?

What is human centered design?

What is human centered design? It’s a development approach that focuses on the needs of the people who will be using a given product or service. 

It takes into account the user’s wants and needs, and then creates a product or service that meets those needs and resonates with the target audience. 

The goal of human centered design is to create products and services that are user-friendly and live up to the expectations of people who will be using them.

Human centered design principles & phrases

It can be stated that there are three main phases of the human centered design process:

• Inspiration – in this stage, designers come up with new ideas by considering the needs of the user.
• Ideation – designers analyze those ideas and turn them into potential solutions.
• Implementation – designers put those solutions into practice and test them to see how well they work.

It’s important to note that human centered design is not just about coming up with new ideas, but about testing those ideas to see if they actually work for the user. So, what are some noteworthy human centered design principles?

• The user is always the focus,
• Designers must have a deep understanding of the target audience and their needs,
• The user’s needs must be translated into actionable insights,
• Designers must constantly test different solutions to see which one works best,
• The goal is to create a product or service that is user-friendly and meets the expectations of people.

Top benefits

There are many reasons why it’s worth adopting the human centered design approach. Some of the most important benefits include:

• Creating products and services that people actually want to use,
• Gaining a deep understanding of the target audience and improving ROI,
• Improving the user experience,
• Generating new ideas,
• Testing different solutions,
• Making data-driven decisions.

Useful human centered design examples

What are some of the popular human centered design examples you could use as an inspiration?

Just think about Spotify or Netflix. They both use data to personalize the user experience and make recommendations based on the user’s listening or watching habits. 

Thanks to them, accessing content (namely movies and songs) that are of interest to you gets easier than ever. You no longer have to scroll through hundreds of titles or playlists to find something that is to your liking. This makes using these apps easy and convenient.

This is the essence of human centered design.

The takeaway

Thanks to leveraging human centered design in your organization, you can inspire trust in potential customers and create products or services meeting their expectations.

In the long run, it’ll allow you to improve your profits and gain a competitive advantage over your market rivals, so the juice is certainly worth the squeeze.