One of the primary reasons startups fail is a lack of market need. Or, in more straightforward terms: The founders built a product or service no one wants.
Creating a successful business requires identifying an underserved need, validating your idea, and crafting an effective value proposition. When taking these steps, one way to ensure you’re on the right path and developing products and services the market will adopt and embrace is bringing prospective customers into the process and leveraging human-centered design.
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DOWNLOAD NOWWhat Is Human-Centered Design?
Human-centered design is a problem-solving technique that puts real people at the center of the development process, enabling you to create products and services that resonate and are tailored to your audience’s needs.
The goal is to keep users’ wants, pain points, and preferences front of mind during every phase of the process. In turn, you’ll build more intuitive, accessible products that are likely to turn a higher profit because your customers have already vetted the solution and feel more invested in using it.
The Phases of Human-Centered Design
In Harvard Business School Online’s Design Thinking and Innovation Course, HBS Dean Srikant Datar breaks human-centered design down into four stages:
- Clarify
- Ideate
- Develop
- Implement
Here’s what each step of the process means and how you can implement it to create products and services people love.
1. Clarify
This first phase is dedicated to collecting data and observing your customers to clarify the problem and how you might solve it. Rather than develop products based on assumptions, you conduct user research and assess customer needs to determine what prospective buyers want.
The clarify phase requires empathy—the capability of understanding another person’s experiences and emotions. You need to consider your customers’ perspectives and ask questions to determine what products they’re currently using, why and how they’re using them, and the challenges they’re trying to solve.
During this phase, you want to discover customers’ pain points, which Dean Datar breaks down into two types:
- Explicit: These are pain points users can describe; they’re aware of what frustrates them about their current experience.
- Latent: These are pain points users can’t describe and might not even know exist.
“Users will be upfront about explicit pain points,” says Dean Datar in Design Thinking and Innovation. “But researchers will need to dig into the experience—observing, listening, and trying it for themselves to get at the latent pain points that lead to transformative innovation.”
To determine your customers’ pain points, observe people using your product and conduct user interviews. Ask questions such as:
- What challenge were you trying to solve when you bought this product?
- What other options did you consider when making your decision?
- What made you choose this product over the alternatives?
With each answer, you’ll start to generate insights you can use to create a problem statement from your users’ perspective. That’s what you’ll try to solve in the following phases.
2. Ideate
The inspiration you gather in the first phase will lead you to the second: ideate. During this stage, you can apply different design thinking tools, such as systematic inventive thinking (SIT) or brainstorming, to overcome cognitive fixedness—a mindset in which you consciously or unconsciously assume there’s only one way to interpret or approach a situation.
Once you’ve overcome cognitive fixedness, the goal is to generate dozens of ideas to amplify creativity and ensure no one gets attached to a potential solution before it’s been tested.
3. Develop
The develop phase is when you combine and critique the ideas you’ve brainstormed to create a range of possible solutions. By combining and evaluating your ideas, you can better meet users’ needs and determine what you want to move into prototyping to reduce costs, save time, and increase your final product’s quality.
Three characteristics of human-centered design that are vital to consider when critiquing ideas are desirability, feasibility, and viability.
- Desirability: Does this innovation fulfill user needs, and is there a market for it?
- Feasibility: Is this functionally possible? Does the organization have the resources to produce this innovation? Are there any legal, economic, or technological barriers?
- Viability: Is this innovation sustainable? Can the company continue to produce or deliver this product profitably over time?
When you start prototyping, you should have presumed answers to these questions so you can learn more about your concepts quickly and, ideally, at a low cost.
“It’s important to evaluate concepts and create prototypes early and often so that you can foster an experimentation mindset and develop tested solutions that are ready for implementation,” says Dean Datar in Design Thinking and Innovation.
4. Implement
The final phase of the process is implementation. During this stage, it’s crucial to communicate your innovation’s value to internal and external stakeholders, including colleagues and consumers, to bring it to market successfully, encourage adoption, and maintain growth.
In the implementation phase, take time to reflect on your organization’s culture and assess group dynamics. Is your team empowered to develop and iterate on user-focused solutions? You can’t continue creating innovative solutions without the right culture.
It’s important to note that your work isn’t over once you reach the final phase. Customers’ wants and needs will continue to evolve. Your goal is to adapt to meet them. Keeping humans at the center of the development process will ensure you’re continuously innovating and achieving product-market fit.
Human-Centered Design in Action
A great example of human-centered design is a children’s toothbrush that’s still in use today. In the mid-nineties, Oral-B asked global design firm IDEO to develop a new kid’s toothbrush. Rather than replicating what was already on the market—a slim, shorter version of an adult-sized toothbrush—IDEO’s team went directly to the source; they watched children brush their teeth.
What they realized is that kids had a hard time holding the skinnier toothbrushes their parents used because they didn’t have the same dexterity or motor skills. Children needed toothbrushes with a big, fat, squishy grip that was easier to hold on to.
“Now every toothbrush company in the world makes these,” says IDEO Partner Tom Kelley in a speech. “But our client reports that after we made that little, tiny discovery out in the field—sitting in a bathroom watching a five-year-old boy brush his teeth—they had the best-selling kid’s toothbrush in the world for 18 months.”
Had IDEO’s team not gone out into the field—or, in this case, children’s homes—they wouldn’t have observed that small opportunity, which turned a big profit for Oral-B.
Leveraging Human-Centered Design in Your Business
By leveraging human-centered design in your business, you can avoid becoming another startup statistic and instead gain a competitive edge by creating products and services that customers love.
Are you interested in learning more about the benefits of human-centered design? Explore our seven-week Design Thinking and Innovation course, one of our entrepreneurship and innovation courses. Not sure which course is right for you? Download our free flowchart to find your fit.
This post was updated on January 6, 2023. It was originally published on December 15, 2020.
