The urgent need to reframe Human-Centered Design for 2021–2031
by Frank Spillers
CEO/CXO @ Experience Dynamics; UXInnerCircle.com
What Human Centered Design promised…
Human-Centered Design (also known as User-Centered Design and what Design Thinking references) is a methodology for creating User Experience (UX) Design that meets people's needs and works as they expect it to. It’s the underlying umbrella methodology behind all UX Design.
Human-Centered Design, an ISO standard (ISO 9241–210: 2019) briefly mentions sustainability, accessibility, and human health: (bold below)
(per ISO): Human-centred design is an approach to interactive systems development 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. This approach enhances effectiveness and efficiency, improves human well-being, user satisfaction, accessibility and sustainability; and counteracts possible adverse effects of use on human health, safety and performance.
Health, however, is a huge category in and of itself, with digital wellness a newcomer and often treated as a fringe problem. Most UX Designers barely touch upon either sustainability or accessibility in their daily work or strategic planning. And when designing Notifications, are you thinking about the hell you are creating for your users?
Clearly, we are in need of an upgrade to how ISO looks at Human-centered design challenges. When you look at a statistic like this, sustainability is not a side issue, it’s central now going forward since we are now in “OMG” mode with this issue:
88% of Consumers want Companies to Help them Make A Difference (Forbes, 2018)
Likewise the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) focus is now mainstream and part of standard expectation in business. For example, every project I am currently working on at Experience Dynamics since the start of 2021, has a JEDI lens. How well Inclusive Design is understood, tackled or practiced is still up in the air — but hey, at least it is top of mind like never before. ISO folks, please take note.
What the Grandfather of Human-Centered Design told the community
Don Norman (Great Grandfather of Human-Centered Design, now 85 years old and retired from Nielsen Norman Group) in 2020 informed the design community that we need an update of our design mission. I recently interviewed him for the Interaction Design Foundation (attending by 4,500 designers globally) about what he calls ‘21st Century Design’. He focused his discussion on sustainability (and the 17 UN goals) as well as community-based or community-driven design, or what I am calling community-centered design.
Defining our new mission…
To meet the complexities of the modern world and the big design ‘problem space’, known as ‘wicked problems’ or the Wicked 7 (see image below), we need to cast humans or consumers in an ecosystem with equal need to the planet’s needs. We have entered this decade with the urgency for repair and redesign of the social fabric and the restoration and wellbeing of the planet.
Repairing and restoring the planet necessarily requires motivating humans to act or to act differently. I am conducting research among consumers on the topic of energy efficiency and sustainability and in line with that statistic above…75% of my users said they want brands to help them improve. Specifically, they want interaction design (information, actions, nudges) and product/service strategy that gives them a receptive role in ‘saving the planet’. If you get current with industry research, it backs this new trend (below)— note this data looked very different just 5–10 years ago. People cared in the last decade, but not as much as they do now.
Per Forrester Research (January 2021):
“Overall, consumers are hyperaware of the condition of the environment. Our data reveals that a third of US online adults say they spend more time thinking about the climate than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media and video streams, like #climateemergency, curate a continuous cycle of content that exposes consumers to the ravaging impacts of climate change and frame the state of the environment as a personal and emotional issue.
More consumers are motivated to take action on environmental sustainability. In direct response to the events of 2020, 36% of US online adults are looking for ways to contribute to local communities, and 31% spend more time thinking about global challenges like poverty or hunger. This mindset sparked bursts of consumer participation in efforts such as Fridays For Future climate action protests and primes 32% of US consumers to prioritize companies that are actively reducing their impact on the environment.
Highly empowered consumers seek and champion brands that commit to sustainability. A growing consciousness about the environment paired with an intensifying desire to participate in community causes is rapidly filtering into empowered consumers’ buying decisions. As expert researchers and device users, empowered shoppers scout information from company values to manufacturing and supply chain practices in search of sustainable options: 68% of highly empowered consumers plan to step up their efforts to identify brands that reduce environmental impact, 61% seek out energy-efficient labels when making purchases, and 47% regularly buy organic products. — Forrester Research, Empowered Consumers Call For Sustainability Transformation
For this pivotal decade, we need a broader definition of Human-centered design to include a variety of crises affecting human society and the planet. Rolled up, this has been called Humanity-Centered Design or Planet-centered Design.
Through a Digital Experience lens, the digital Wicked 7 might look like this:
At the top: (clockwise)
Sustainability UX: The need to create products and services that factor for “Closed Loop” or Cradle-to-Cradle certification. The UX portion is what the human who purchases, demands, consumes and interacts with the product does with it. e.g. Smart Thermostats if poorly designed can lead to non-use of supposed energy-saving features (that’s the case with my personal story at home). Interesting to note that Google’s Nest which was conceived and built by an Interaction Designer leader (Tony Faddell), now “learns” offering little user burden to manage their behavior.
“Dark” Patterns: Manipulative user experiences ranging from ecommerce to social media and more create havoc in today’s digital world. Dark patterns deliberately mislead or have the unintended effect of tricking or deceiving users. This often starts with business models.
Fighting Misinformation: Deceptive hijacking of perceptions (weaponized information warfare) is a huge problem in business and worse in the electoral process — now a global problem. In addition, misinformation about health or other issues starts on digital platforms and outlets.
Ethics in UX and AI: Bias begins with how information is framed and how choices are perceived by people. In UX terms, designers and developers play a pivotal role in ethical outcomes. Giving our products and services an ethics-based UX Design and value-sensitive design approach is critical for avoiding exclusion of historically underrepresented communities.
Social Media & Device Addiction: Get off your phone! Yes, that’s right you know who you are…This is actually a serious problem (backed now by numerous studies, including several new scales for measuring smartphone phone addition) and an obstacle to clear thinking. It is now recognized that Social media is worse than cocaine.
Digital wellness: Per addiction that can result from phone, email, Internet searching, social media and notifications experiences, designers need to dig deeper into the digital wellness puzzle. Silicon Valley has provided a few flimsy models to date, none of them address real digital wellness to my liking. To date digital wellness has been treated as a cosmetic bandage, versus a core design problem. Unfortunately addiction touches business models so this is indeed a ‘wicked’ problem.
Inclusive Design: Bringing users into your design process (design with, not for) is the single most important quality, improvement and bottom line producing activity. However, just your ‘target audience’ (highest value) is not enough from an equity perspective. Equity means giving users who are historically left out of the design process input and shaping of the design solution. Just as team diversity adds value and has been linked to innovation, connecting with under-represented user populations is critical to identifying new opportunities and hidden revenue as well as avoiding bias in the design process. It’s time that our design and research as well as product development efforts include users with disabilities; people of color; women; the LGBTQ+ community and more.
Conclusion: Human-centered design gave us the focus on the individual, in the context of software, a product or experience. Due to the rapid complexity, societal change and demand from consumers, our definition and efforts must expand this decade 2021–2031 (minus 1 year to balance for pandemic craziness) to cover repairing and restoring our social fabric and planetary priorities. We urgently need to re-energize how we work, how we define problems and how our processes accomodate the new realities.
Note: To learn more about How UX Designers can help solve Sustainability Challenges check out this webinar (April 22nd 2021).
About the author: Frank Spillers, CEO/ CXO of Experience Dynamics, a leading UX consulting firm with Fortune 500 clients worldwide.
For over 20 years, Frank has been a seasoned UX consultant, Researcher, Designer, and Trainer. He is an award-winning expert in improving the design of digital products, services, and experiences. Frank is a Subject Matter Expert in UX Design, UX Management, Accessibility, Emotion Design, Service Design, Localization UX, Lean UX, VR/ AR UX Design. He provides private corporate training and offers courses to the largest online design organization in the world (Interaction Design Foundation). In 2001, Frank founded UX consulting firm Experience Dynamics. He provides deep learning opportunities at UX Inner Circle.
