By Henrik Ebbesen and Mark Thomasson
Successful digital transformation starts with humans beings — the technology comes later. Starting with people, their needs, goals and pain points, and the context of their interactions, means that solutions are aiming at meaningful outcomes, not just new software. Applying Human-Centered Design as a key part of technology implementations.
What is human-centered design in digital transformation?
One of the most commonly heard myths regarding Human-Centered Design (HCD) is its primarily related to design, with the purpose of creating a user interface that looks good and is functional. That cannot be any further from the truth. Human Centered Design is an approach for driving truly transformative change in any organization.
The goal of a true Human-Centered approach is to deeply connect with your customers and employees already when you are planning for your digital transformation. We want to go deeper than simply what do they need to do from a business perspective, but more why do they need to do it. How does it affect the them? What are the current pain points in how it is done today and how does that affect their day-to-day? By gaining this true understanding of customer and employee needs, wants, and pain points — you can align your technology and business goals to support those needs and prioritize workstreams that will have the largest impact on the user and across your own organization.
Why and how to engage in human-centered design
There are three main elements present in every digital transformation: the people, the business and the technology. Far too often, however, companies that let digital and technology get in the way of what matters most: the people. Not enough focus is placed on maximizing experiences, processes and functionalities to align with the people who will actually be using the the solution.
Two overall criteria's to frame human-centered design and simplify the process comes to mind:
Understand the business: Concentrating on the Why and Who. The target user is identified, priorities and expectations are expressed, finally KPIs are clear and know to everyone. Understanding the user helps develop the high-level architecture of the solution and places the elevated human experience in the heart of the project.
Plan the Experience: This helps to assess the right technical direction toward achieving the desired performance and experience goals.
The lens of human desirability is what makes the difference. Through this lens processes are reshaped and experiences are elevated to align with user expectations.Enterprises of tomorrow will win or lose pending the experiences that is offered to the end user, employees and potential business partners.
ONE-SIZE FITS FEW (OR NONE)
Too often, people are the reason transformations fail. If they don’t buy in to changes, it’s almost impossible for new technologies and processes to succeed. Use human-centric design principles to encourage change and adaptation by:
Identifying and understanding the users
When it comes to encouraging behavioral change, remember this: people are different. Often the classic segments are made up of people with diverse characteristics, from their roles, ages and cultural backgrounds to their digital skill sets and readiness for change.
To foster stronger digital enablement, it’s important to understand the different journeys people are on and what will encourage them to change how they work. By using personas to support the human-centered design approach enables a tailored, relevant and consistent experience for users across all digital touchpoints.
In order to develop valid data-driven personas, qualitative user interviews should be conducted with the focus of gathering true and deep insights into how users think, work and act. These insights will lay the foundation to new and validated roles and behavior sets, addressing different pain points enabling us to improve the user experience and customizing user journeys.
Understanding the context
Identifying key personas is just a part of the human-centered design process. Once you understand the difference between different user segments, you need to understand how and within what context and mental model each segment works and what can be done to encourage them to either support their existing behavior or to potentially change it. Creating “as is” journey maps based on the identified personas will inform the solution design and the strategy for digital enabling. Combine that with future-to-be journey maps will help understand where the opportunity gabs exists and what can be done to influence the user experience positively, and ensure that the solution is fulfilling real user needs. By understand the context of personas journey will make it possible to identify what can be done to aid them in solving the “tasks to be done” and achieve their goals
Tailoring the onboarding experiences
Adaptation can make or break the success of a transformation. It’s important to understand the unique needs of different personas during the design process. But equally important is the need to tailor learning experiences and training to different personas so that users with different profiles can be supported in embracing digital adoption rather than fear it. Developing persona-specific learning modules as part the transformation journey is critical to support adaptation. This includes designing an array of interventions for each of the different personas in a way so the user can better understand how changes would affect them directly. For example, creating a digital proficiency curve to increase the adoption of digital tools among different user segments which will support not only the adaptation of a specific digital platform but looking at the problem more holistically. By understanding each personas digital proficiency levels and learning style we can design a onboarding experience that takes into consideration that people comes from different starting points and have different preferred way of acquiring new knowledge or to adapt to new ways of working.
Reducing cost and time to market
Implementing a user-centered approach across both the specification, design and development phases of a project will save money, time and effort for rework. User research early in the project lifecycle reveals which features are most valuable to users, saving you from building features that are not needed and to ensure the features that are being built is built after an optimal user centric specification.
Human-Centered Design ensures that your technology investments will meet user needs and usability standards, resulting in higher user engagement, greater system efficiency and more satisfied users.
Introducing user experience design activities into the standard digital platform development process would seem to add time and cost to projects. However, such activities actually saves both time and money by ensuring that the right solutions is designed from the very start and by finding and correcting issues early on in the project, when problems are much easy and inexpensive to remidy. When a user interface is designed by someone who knows and applies principles of human needs, mental models and design best practices, many UX problems are avoided before launch.
Iterative usability testing and redesign finds and fixes problems and validates the design direction. Before development begins, the design is validated by both the business and users, eliminating costly change requests due to unmet requirements and usability problems late in the development process. It’s much less expensive to perform changes during the requirements definition and the design phase than it is to make them during or after development or launch.
Instead of spending the initial phase creating an purely “inside out” specification, you should build deliverables around the end users’ core needs but combining it with in-depth knowledge of the capabilities of the industry and best practice, making sure to avoid too much custom development while at the same time developing a solution that actually solves users needs.
In Conclusion..
By using a Human Centered mindsets, tools, attributes and modes you will finish your project knowing that:
1. The end user got a solution that addressed their needs and the onboarding process was efficient and relevant and empathetic
2. Key stakeholders got an end to end high quality solution. A professional user centric process and an assessment of gaps and risks through out the project.
3. The solution was designed and developed to be both viable, feasible, and desirable
Co-Author: Mark Thomasson