Human-Centered Design: Creating Solutions for Real Needs

Human-centered design approaches prioritize the end user, directly designing for their needs, lifestyles, preferences, and behaviors. As a human-centered designer, you aim to solve the “root” of the problem, taking creative approaches to user concerns or challenges. Learn more about human-centered design and how you might use it. Explore its benefits and challenges, successful examples in practice, and what a typical human-centered design process looks like.

course

Human-Centered Design: an Introduction

In this course, you will learn how to design technologies that bring people joy, rather than frustration. You'll learn several techniques for rapidly ...

4.7

(2,751 ratings)

142,056 already enrolled

Learn More

Average time: 14 hour(s)

Learn at your own pace

What is human-centered design?

Human-centered design is a creative approach to problem-solving that focuses on the user’s needs and preferences. This design philosophy prioritizes products and services that directly cater to user behaviors and aims to meet users' needs throughout each stage of the design process. 

For example, when Colgate’s electric toothbrush fell behind competitors, they hired a human-centered design firm to help them reformulate their current product. The designers identified that users were steering away from clunky hardware while still desiring the electric function. With this information, Colgate created a slender toothbrush that had a sleek finish without sacrificing performance. By understanding the users of your product, their needs, life situations, and the types of experiences they are most likely to seek out, you can develop solutions that are tailored to your audience. 

What has human-centered design been used for?

Human-centered design has been used to create many types of products, from household items to the online platforms you use every day. Many companies employ this method to find creative solutions to common problems, sometimes before users even recognize the problem exists. One example of this is Spotify. In the days when CDs and iTunes were the most popular options, people would often pay a few dollars for a single song or collection of songs. While this was the norm, Spotify recognized that people were struggling to pay for all of the music they wanted to enjoy, and the disjointed system of sourcing music from several places was inconvenient. To address this problem, they created a digital platform with one monthly fee where users can get all their music and house it in one place. 

While Spotify embodies this type of design process, many other apps have also found success by placing the user at the center of the design process. By recognizing an inconvenience users experience day-to-day and creating a convenient solution for it, apps are able to fill market niches that were previously unrecognized. Additional examples of this include FitBit, which created a way for people to keep track of their fitness goals and progress in one place. Venmo, meanwhile, allows people to easily transfer money to each other across different bank platforms and payment systems.

Principles of human-centered design

Human-centered design processes differ from standard design processes by focusing on connecting with the end user and considering user needs from a different perspective. When exploring human-centered design, consider a few of its core principles. 

Empathize with your audience.

A core part of the human-centered design process is cultivating empathy toward your end users. By being involved directly with users, you can more readily understand the unique cultural influences, challenges, and preferences of your audience, which inform different aspects of the design process. You also may cultivate a deeper sense of respect and care for your end users, and feel more passionate about creating a product that truly meets their needs in a way that is intuitive and sustainable.

Iterate on your designs.

To create a design that works, you’ll likely need to iterate on your ideas and design drafts. Once you begin building something, you might find that real users interact differently with it than you expected. For example, you might receive feedback that your product or service was more difficult to navigate than expected, or that certain features didn’t meet the intended goal. 

Human-centered designers often care deeply about solving the problem and expect to try many solutions before finding the right fit. By receiving feedback early and often, you can make changes as needed to perfect your product before venturing too far into development.

Think about solutions creatively.

In human-centered design, you often look at user needs in new ways. Rather than redesigning an existing solution, you’re identifying a novel way to solve a user’s concerns by considering their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors during the design process. 

Find the right problem.

As a designer, people might approach you with problems and have a solution in mind. However, in many cases, they might be presenting you with symptoms of a problem rather than the issue itself. For example, if someone came to you and said “I don’t have a car and I need one to get to work,” the problem appears to be that this person does not have a car. However, upon closer inspection, you might identify the real problem as “This person does not have a way to commute to work.” By going deeper into the underlying problem, you open your thought process to different types of solutions rather than reaching for the current standard solution.

Who uses human-centered design?

Human-centered design is widely used across industries and disciplines, especially in fields catering directly to user needs. Product designers often use human-centered design to create user-friendly interfaces and experiences that directly address the needs and preferences of end users. Their work may be supported by user experience (UX) researchers and designers. They study the behaviors of consumers to derive insights that can help drive these design decisions. UX designers can help to test different prototype options, track user feedback, and analyze which designs need updating and where.

As machine learning becomes more integrated into everyday life, human-centered machine learning designers have become in demand. Human-centered machine learning engineers work specifically on technology-based programs and applications. They look for ways to automate or integrate artificial intelligence to optimize a certain process or relieve a burden on certain populations. If you’re interested in computer science, this career path can be a fun way to integrate more creativity into your day-to-day tasks.

Benefits of human-centered design processes

Human-centered design puts the focus on people in a way that allows for creativity and effective problem-solving. By removing what you expect the solution to be, you create space for new and exciting innovation. Human-centered design creates a way for designers to directly connect with end users, build empathy with their target audience, nurture a passion for solving the problem at hand, and create solutions that truly revolutionize current systems. 

Another benefit of human-centered design is that it creates solutions that consider the real context and needs of the end user. While it might be tempting for designers to design with their own circumstances in mind, this doesn’t always match the true environment of end use. For example, if you’re designing medical devices for a hospital, you might assume the hospital has electricity and running water. If, in fact, the hospital doesn’t have these resources, then designs relying on these assumptions suddenly aren’t able to perform as needed. However, taking the time to connect with end users, do research on the current environment, and design with environmental challenges in mind can help you design a solution that is much more effective for the actual use setting.

Challenges of human-centered design processes

As with any process, the human-centered design philosophy also comes with drawbacks. For one, balancing user needs with business goals can present challenges. When you need to ensure organizational goals can be met, you may sometimes have difficulty presenting consumers with the “best” product for their preferences. As a designer, you’ll need to find a balance between the two, ensuring user satisfaction without sacrificing organizational objectives.

Another challenge may be resistance to change. When changing the status quo, you might find resistance to particularly new or innovative ideas. It may take time to convince stakeholders or users to embrace new perspectives, but taking an iterative approach (i.e., small steps) can help people welcome change.

How to think through the human-centered design process

The human-centered design process allows for continual adaptation and refinement. When approaching a design challenge through this lens, consider the following steps:

1. Observe your users: Resist projecting your needs onto the users. Instead, try to observe your end user with an open mind. This can help you identify the user experience and where any challenges may be.

2. Ideate as many solutions as you can: During the ideation process, no idea is too big. Come up with as many solutions as you can without losing focus on the user’s needs. During this stage, you can develop customer journey maps, create user personas, sketch design ideas, and try out different approaches to keep the ideas flowing.

3. Create simple prototypes: Once you have a starting idea, creating a simple mock-up can help you test your idea with users. This provides the insight you need to adjust your ideas as necessary.

4. Collect user feedback: With your prototype, collect as much user feedback as you can. During this phase, you determine whether this solution is actually the right one for your end users or whether you’ll need to make adjustments.

5. Iterate on your designs: Based on your feedback, continually update your design and re-test with users. This continual feedback and iteration process will help you land on a design that best serves your users.

6. Implement your final product: Once you’ve received the feedback you need to make a final product, taking it to your stakeholders and customers is the final step (for now). Remember, as consumer needs evolve, it’s up to you and your team to ensure your design evolves with them.

Learn more about human-centered design on Coursera

By leveraging human-centered design processes, you can create products that directly align with user priorities and needs. On Coursera, you may explore more about this philosophy, as well as other design philosophies, to see how they might fit into your professional toolkit. To start, consider taking the Human-Centered Design: an Introduction to learn basic concepts, or go further with the full Interaction Design Specialization.

course

Human-Centered Design: an Introduction

In this course, you will learn how to design technologies that bring people joy, rather than frustration. You'll learn several techniques for rapidly ...

4.7

(2,751 ratings)

142,056 already enrolled

Learn More

Average time: 14 hour(s)

Learn at your own pace

specialization

Interaction Design

Learn how to design great user experiences. Design that delights users

4.5

(3,140 ratings)

65,849 already enrolled

Intermediate level

Learn More

Average time: 3 month(s)

Learn at your own pace

Skills you'll build:

Storyboarding, Heuristic Evaluation, R Programming, A/B Testing, User Research, Persona (User Experience), Human–Computer Interaction, User Experience (UX), User Experience Design (UXD), User Interface, Information Design, User Interface Techniques, Responsive Web Design, Website Wireframe, Usability Testing, Statistics, Experimental Design, Statistical Model, Experiment, Rapid Prototyping, Paper Prototyping