Are We at Risk of Failing at Human-Centered Design as an Industry?
By Chris Bradshaw and Shannon Ruetsch, Infinum
Human-centered design is considered an industry-wide standard as the best approach to take when designing digital products and experiences. Anyone who works as a product strategist or user experience designer likely feels proud to say that we prioritize designing for humans above all else. But do we prioritize it enough? Do we really make people’s lives better with the work we do?
We are living in a time when there are more rapid and widespread technological and cultural changes than ever before. As an industry, are we letting ourselves get distracted from our core mission to prioritize the human point of view in every step of the design process?
What gets in the way of keeping design human-centered?
The reality of being a designer, whether working at an agency or in-house, is that most of the design work we are doing is for businesses who have business-related goals and numbers to hit. In most design engagements we enter, we still find ourselves needing to advocate for the value of user research, usability testing, and keeping end users involved throughout the design process. While many of us designers believe in the importance of doing human-centered design, the reality is that it’s the portion of a design project scope that is most often challenged, reduced, or cut to save money or save time. When it comes down to it, we’ve got some serious constraints to contend with to walk the talk, despite believing in the value of human-centered design.
On top of business and budget constraints, technological advances are happening faster than our brains can keep up with—we can’t even comprehend all of the immediate or future implications of all the new tech at our fingertips at individual or societal levels. The “move fast and break things” tech startup culture, coined by Mark Zuckerberg in Facebook’s early days in the 2000s, was exciting for a while because it encouraged experimentation. In recent years, though, it has become increasingly evident that the negative consequences of moving too quickly without prioritizing human needs can be quite significant. Studies are beginning to come out that prove the harmful effects digital products can have from increasing depression and suicide rates in kids who use social media to the environmental impact our high usage of digital products is having on our planet.
Keeping design human-centered is key to helping us navigate these complex issues in the digital landscape:
Protecting privacy while delivering on personalization. Everyone likes the convenience of personalized experiences, right? At the same time, there is a growing movement to protect privacy. Inherently, in order to personalize an experience, you need access to someone’s private, personal data—from their birthday to their topic preferences to behavior tracking, all of these are forms of data that can be used to power personalization and the general public hasn’t always been aware of all the personal data various companies are collecting about them. With the establishment of GDPR and CCPA, protecting privacy is becoming more regulated and important, so across the design industry, we have had to start thinking about how to design for consent. Cookie banner consent pop-ups now proliferate the interwebs, but does that truly solve this problem of protecting a human’s privacy?
Making digital products accessible to all. The ADA was signed into law in 1990. The WCAG was created in 1999. It’s really only in the last 5 years that the design industry as a whole has made a bigger effort to prioritize designing for accessibility—and that accessible design is table stakes, not an optional add-on. Like the cookie banners, we have seen plugins popping up that allow users to “view this in accessible mode” as a band-aid solution, but is that solution actually designed to meet a human’s accessibility needs?
Mitigating bias in search and AI tools. We are all familiar with search engines and how useful they are at getting you information extremely quickly. AI tools like ChatGPT are taking this to the next level. You are probably familiar with the news story when someone discovered Google’s search algorithm was returning primarily criminal photos whenever someone searched for “black teens” or similar. As we start to experiment with all the ways we can leverage AI tools like ChatGPT in our design process, we need to think about how to better mitigate and control for these types of biases.
How to keep design human-centered and still leverage the latest technology.
We need to re-commit to keeping humans at the center of our design process, but we can’t ignore tech advances. Let’s figure out smart ways to leverage and experiment with the latest technology but be cautious about implementing it too quickly without proper due diligence on considering the pros and cons and if the technology truly does help solve real human needs.
Continue to advocate for user research in all of our design engagements. We have yet to do any kind of user research that results in learning nothing, so it is never a waste of time. Let’s not jump to creating solutions in search of problems. Let’s make sure we understand the problems we are trying to solve.
Learn about new tech tools and what they can potentially do. Take the time to understand and experiment with it. That way, when you come across new challenges, you’ll have knowledge of new tools and technology in your arsenal as a potential solution to explore.
Err on the side of caution when considering leveraging innovative new technology as part of any digital product design solution, especially anything large-scale or widespread.
Use increased regulation around privacy and accessibility to our advantage. Companies are now facing legal consequences for not creating products that uphold privacy and accessibility standards. As designers, we can lean on this as a reason not to cut corners in these areas.
Recommit to human-centered design.
As we look to the future, we believe designers are going to continue to have an important role to play in determining how things like AI, accessibility, and personalization evolve going forward. AI in particular is rapidly and more reliably able to accomplish new tasks, but we need to work with AI to direct it with the right prompts and guardrails. If we fail to prioritize human-centered decision-making, we risk quickly alienating humans as AI becomes increasingly integrated into all aspects of our lives. We want to leverage tech, not lead with tech, and therefore we need to hold ourselves accountable for not dropping the ball on keeping humans at the center of design work.
Chris Bradshaw, Infinum
Chris holds a role as the Global Product Strategy Director at Infinum, one of the world's leading software development agencies. With two decades of experience in building products and companies across most industries, he bridges the worlds of business, strategy, and innovation, by seamlessly integrating new technologies, design principles, and processes to create transformative experiences.
Shannon Ruetsch, Infinum