Embracing Human-Centered Design

Human-centered design is less about what process you follow and more about how you engage your audience. In its simplest form, human-centered design is involving the people you’re designing for. Involve them at every step in the design journey, whatever that looks like for you.

Here are a few rules that will ensure you involve your humans as you design.

Rule 1: Don’t create digital training without teaching the content first.

A huge percentage of digital training is created “in the lab” by instructional designers or vendors. With fast-moving timelines and business deadlines, it is not hard to see how content gets written by SMEs and delivered straight to the designers so they can whip up an eLearning or animated video. We get it — time is of the essence.

But that’s how you end up with bloated training, overly complicated videos, and learning experiences that miss the mark because they don’t align with your learners’ needs and experience. How will you know what your learners think if you don’t take the time to teach and refine the content first? We recommend delivering gathering a few groups of learners virtually to experience the content and be helpful learner guinea pigs. This group of actual learners at your organization can bring their fresh perspectives and, if properly invited, can share all thoughts and questions on the content. We suggest asking learners to input their questions and thoughts in the chat as they have them and then using the transcript to debrief together afterward. This is essentially rough prototyping, which is an essential practice of human-centered design.

Rule 2: Don’t launch and leave.

Just because the course is live doesn’t mean the design process is complete. Design a survey that you can administer during the first year of all new courses as a way to evaluate the experience and monitor effectiveness. A survey with some open input fields provides an easy avenue for learners to submit questions that weren’t answered in the course and ideas for improvement. Be sure to explain that the course is new and you are eagerly seeking learner input.

This surveying strategy is a great way to compensate for the (understandable) need to sometimes rush courses through the design process and deploy them sooner than you would like. Have a plan to review results as a team and make updates periodically so you can make continuous improvement toward an effective learning experience.

Rule 3: Don’t design yourself into a corner.

There are so many ways to interpret this. Yes, we mean all of them — all the ways one can overdesign, overcomplicate, and otherwise design oneself into a corner. Top of our list: don’t choose a development method or a design that you can’t update easily. You can have a great design that’s also easy to produce. The two are not mutually exclusive. It’s not about bells and whistles - it’s about writing compelling stories, designing interesting interactions, and choosing the most practical modalities. There are so many great tools for rapid development that make maintenance easy so we can be constantly iterating and improving the learning experience.

So, those days of annual update cycles? Those are only acceptable if you’re stuck translating to 19 languages — and even for those organizations, we know some translation services who have improved that process so drastically by creating smart translation memories and working with you to design an efficient process.

So be free — free to iterate, to tweak, and to try something new and see what kind of feedback and performance results you get!

We’d love to hear your other human-centered design ideas below. How do you keep the focus on the humans you’re designing for?