Human-Centered Design Isn't Only About The Customer
In 1869, Alfred Ely unveiled his Beach Pneumatic Transit. It was to be a series of underground, pressurized tubes that would safely shuttle passengers around New York City. The design was not all that different from Elon Musk's current Hyperloop.
A competing solution at the time was the subway–and not the enclosed, air conditioned, wifi-equipped train cars of today. The subway of that era was merely an underground trolley car system. It was slow, risky, and exposed passengers to underground elements (i.e. rats - more so than today, believe it or not - and dirt). Plus, there was a decent chance you'd lose your bonnet or top hat. Bummer. As much as Ely's solution was better and more appealing for the passengers, City Hall ultimately decided to invest in the subway because it more closely aligned with the city's vision, timeline, and resources.
This story helps us understand that human-centered design has more stakeholders to regard than just the customer (passengers). As folks who work in Design, Product, and Innovation, we tend to obsess over the customer experience while neglecting or de-emphasizing the needs and expectations of the business. We convince ourselves that if we solely delight the customer, the company will make its money and business leaders will get on board.
So we go off designing in a vacuum. In doing so, we neglect our business stakeholder - a core persona we need to account for. They not only have critical internal company insights to be considered, but likely have some ideas and perspectives about the customer problem we're attempting to solve.
We get the allure of ghosting them from the process.
Non-designers, non-product folks - they tend to be more raw when it comes to the principles of human-centered design that we’ve honed over time:
Asking over telling
Divergent & convergent thinking
Visualizing ideas
Remaining curious
Using generative language
Allowing time to learn together
Instead, our business stakeholders tend to make decisions that skew to revenue generation and cost savings. Critical to the livelihood of the business, but, if we’re being real, rarely the stuff that stokes our creative fire.
They also have a discouraging habit of telling us the solution they need us to build, versus opening up a conversation around the problem to be solved.
The truth is, we and our business stakeholders are failing to be human-centered when we cut the legs out of the other based on what's important to us. The customer is a stakeholder, the business is a stakeholder. When we solve for both, everyone wins.
In order to get there, we need to remember a third stakeholder: The team. Without a team that's able to model those human-centered principles, the products & services we create cannot be human-centered either.
So, be human-centered when talking with your customers. Discover opportunities from their current pains and needs. Be human-centered to align those pains with the vision and priorities of the business. And then when it comes time to empathize, define, ideate... be human-centered with one another so that the team is committed and empowered to build winning solutions together.
