Human-centered design (HCD) is an approach to problem-solving that involves the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process. It is commonly used in process, product, service, and system design, management, and engineering frameworks. The goal of HCD is to develop solutions to problems by focusing on the users, their needs, and requirements, and by applying human factors/ergonomics and usability knowledge and techniques.
HCD is a problem-solving technique that puts real people at the center of the development process, enabling the creation of products and services that resonate and are tailored to the audiences needs. The approach involves keeping users' wants, pain points, and preferences front of mind during every phase of the process.
The key aspects of HCD include focusing on people and their context, understanding and solving the right problems, understanding that everything is a complex system with interconnected parts, and continually prototyping, testing, and refining products and services to ensure that solutions truly meet the needs of the people they focus on.
ISO 9241-210 defines HCD as an approach to interactive systems that aims to make systems usable and useful by focusing on the users, their needs and requirements, and by applying human factors/ergonomics, and usability knowledge and techniques. The following principles are key to the human-centered approach: suitability for the task, self-descriptiveness, conformity with user expectations, suitability for learning, controllability, error tolerance, and suitability for individualization.
In summary, HCD is a design approach that puts the users first, resulting in useful and usable products and services. It involves understanding users' needs, constraints, contexts, behaviors, and wants, building deep empathy with them, generating multiple ideas to help solve their problems, and arriving at a solution via rapid prototyping.
