Phase 1 - Observe 1/3 (The What)

A few weeks ago I shared with you here my overall flow of how I design experiences from the nano to the strategic macro.

Over the coming weeks, I will now breakdown each phase discussing what it is, how it’s applied and tools and techniques to do it. As I am sure you can imagine these could be really long posts so to keep them simple I will do each phase in a set of articles. 

The What, The Why and The How

The key thing to remember throughout these posts is that it’s designing from the actors' point of view, my definition of Experience Design (XD) can be found here if you need a recap.

The What

The first point with any design flow, process, method or framework should always be the human, mainly because when it comes to experiences the one constant is always a human, if not how would we ever have an experience it in the first place.

Human Centred Design (HCD) is the foundation of all great design, it is a method for designing a solution that is built around the human wants needs and frustrations when directed at the right problem

Now there are many mindset and frameworks to follow on this ranging from Google’s Design Sprint, IDEO maybe even IBM loop model or D.schools model.

The reality is they all have cross overs, strength and weaknesses, instead what I proposed in last weeks article here was applying a design ‘as’ thinking mindset and not being stuck to just one way of doing things, understanding the right tools for the right challenges will help with this.

Human Centred Design is not new, there I said it as much as people will try and sell it to you as the next coming, its really not and anyone can do it with a little understanding, hard work and lots of practice.

I think all good strategic thinkers, designers, leaders have been doing this for years they maybe just didn't call it Human centred design. In fact, I found an example of HCD stemming all the way back to 1894 they created a little brand we all know

*que the story and dream sequence*

 A Quick Story

John: Hey my awesome brother Will, my patients are struggling with eating and digesting their breakfast I think... fancy helping me?

Will: Count me in, so just to reframe that, you're looking for a better way for your patients to eat and digest food to get them out of the hospital quicker

Will being the hero he was, started to focus on observing human interactions with the bread and started to come up with a lot of new ideas, however, nothing was hitting the mark. In a right paddy, Will went to bed and left out a pot of wheat overnight… waking up he noticed the wheat became soft rolling out these bits of wheat and baking them he noticed they baked into these little crispy flakes.

Will: Hey john, you know because I am the best brother in the whole world I have something for you and the situation fancy letting me test drive it on your patients?

Anyway after much feedback and tweaks including the change from wheat to corn we now have the cornflake

While I don't think they said okay let's do HCD they definitely did it.

We see these types of stories and outputs throughout time the creation of SPANX, the success of the children's toothbrush… even a chainsaw is a great example of HCD

(not sure how I went from ladies underwear to children's toothbrushes to chainsaws but I did oh well)

Examples of HCD

I have a super geek crush on the work IDEO does and the impact it has on the world and they are totally worth checking out for their success stories as I am sure Google and d.school have too but none of the above are the silver bullet and when it comes to designing experiences much more is needed in my view, hence why over time I developed my own flow.

When it comes to my HCD phase I take aspects from all the above names… but I have also decided to re-word the touchpoints in the journey mainly to hit home the task at hand.

These touchpoints are:

• Observe 
• Understand
• Dream
• Make
• Break

Which we will get into over the coming weeks

Summary 

• Human interaction and their point of view must always come first when creating experiences
• Human centred design is not new
• All frameworks have overlapped, don't waste too much time trying to search which is best 
• Don’t be locked down to one way of doing things try them all