Is human-centered Design broken?
This is not a statement but rather a reflection regarding my recent readings about the negative side of an HCD approach. Is it harmful? Is it broken? Or do we still need it?
Recently I came across an article whose title caught my attention: Human-Centered Design Is Broken. Here’s a Better Alternative. Since I am reading Don Norman’s book, “The Design of Everyday Thing”, I decided to give it a read. In his article, Jesse Weaver explores the bee-centred-design concept; a sustainable approach under the design thinking process. He claims that by shifting our focus on the weaker link (in this case, the bees), we would be able to measure the real impacts in the entire chain.
While centering the human perspective can help foster more humane design outcomes, it also perpetuates myopic navel-gazing.
Jesse Weaver
Despite Weaver’s theory being an interesting approach, it is still necessary to incorporate human-centered design to reach a common goal within the UX/UI perspective.
Ever since I started studying UX/UI, one of the most common sentences that I hear is: ”you are not designing for yourself”; ”you are not your end-user” among other mottos. It is a naked truth. Once a designer starts building under his own believes and experiences, we are bound to have an ethnocentric design or if you prefer, a myopic view of the process.
The human-centred Design
Understanding human behaviour is indispensable, and psychology will be a vital tool for UX/UI designers. Society expects designers to build great products and outstanding interfaces. However, to achieve these things, we must understand the human mental process and how its needs and capabilities will match the solution we are creating.
“Human-centered design is a design philosophy. It means starting with a good understanding of people and the needs that the design is intended to meet.”
Don Norman, In The Psychopathology of Everyday Things
The bee-centered design would be a new way to go against the HCD anthropocentric approach, according to Jess. But even when building for a sustainable cause, what he calls a “common goal”, HCD will help designers to achieve the best result.
Understanding user needs does not mean neglecting the environment. It means that once designers become aware of how humans interact and perceive those topics — and UX designer will do that by developing researches, the design process will go smoother. To build a product (or service) focus on a common goal, designers still have to consider two main points of HCD: usability and accessibility.
To explain my point of view, I would like to use Oroeco as an example. Oroeco is an application that allows you to combat climate change by calculating your daily carbon footprint. Is an app build on a common goal (sustainability) and its effectiveness is a result of human centered design. Without the research and the knowledge of how users are dealing with climate change, the usability and prototyping process would not have resulted in a successful app.
Data is an essential resource in a UX designer life, and to get to it, research will have to be done and HCD will be applied. We can not develop the Design Thinking process without taking into account the purpose and circumstances surrounding the product and of course, the user. For today’s ways of thinking, human centered design is a must and is far from being broken.
