When a product is designed, it shouldn’t be created because I want to make something new. Instead it should address a problem that is actually worth solving. Figuring out the fundamentals, would not just solve 50% of the problem, but also provide a base for the right research and ideation.
Sometimes, when the focus is on the symptoms of a problem, and not the core itself, we as designers end up creating a new set of problems as a solution to the previous symptoms. We then try and and solve the new set, creating another set of problems. This process complicates the solution and eventually ends up hampering the user’s experience.
Therefore, the second principle that I follow is to identify and address the correct fundamental problem that lies behind the prevailing symptoms, before coming up with a design solution.
When I design the solution, creating it for people remains my priority, but along with that I also ensure that I focus on meeting the user’s expectations and that my product complies with them in such a way that it meets their journey end to end, thereby improving the user’s experience, and ensuring that every aspect of our solution is interconnected to the system.
This way, I eliminate the possibilities of having loose ends and end up creating a design solution that a user doesn’t have to struggle to use.
When a product, service or system is designed, it should be created keeping in mind a human’s requirements, their level of understanding, and their ability to pursue information. Therefore, one of the most significant principle that I follow is to ensure that the product is designed for the right target audience who are the human users of a product, and not machines or technology.
To accomplish this, before designing an effective solution to the problem, I empathise with the users, explore the challenges and opportunities that they encounter in real life, and acknowledge how, where, when and why would they use the product that is designed.
Creating a human-centric solution to the problem ensures the trustworthiness of the product making it appropriate for people to use
The first solution of a problem may not be the only solution, even though it may look like the best one at that point of time, there is always a second, third and fourth, a better one.
The last principle of Human Centred Design that I follow is ‘validating my decisions’. I start small, with the focus on creating multiple iterations, learning from them, and eventually increasing the required components at each level of our solution to ensure that we design and come up with the simplest possible solution to our problem.
I also significantly emphasise on generating multiple prototypes to see which one fits the users best and test out the solutions with people over and over again so that their feedback could help me better understand them, and their problems.
