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Value of Human-Centered Design

Human-Centered Design (HCD) delivers value by raising the quality of a product or service. Users consider a well-designed product to be:

  • Effective – functionally fit and doing the right thing
  • Safe – reliable and trustworthy
  • Efficient – increasing productivity and facilitating decision making
  • Intuitive – easy to learn and remember
  • Fun – attractive and challenging

Having a product with these qualities benefits the producing organisation, through its customers and its own employees. Here we list some of the benefits.

Users save time

A well-conceived interface saves users time in their day-to-day job. If designers truly understand the user’s tasks, they design the user interface around these tasks. A well-designed user interface can significantly reduce the number of manual operations.

We know of one case where a very common task in a call center (entering a trouble ticket) took 16 manual operations (scrolling, clicking and selecting) in one user interface and 4 in another user interface. This sort of efficiency gain easily translates into euro value.

Users make better decisions and fewer errors

Appropriate visualisation of data essential to a task results in better decisions and fewer errors. Errors can have far-reaching effects that need to be corrected. Some errors can never be corrected.

Competitive advantage

HCD can make the difference between product failure and success. A user interface that focuses on task execution and hides technical complexity, increases the chances of product uptake. Although a new product can be a success among innovators and early adopters, it is only really successful when it is adopted by the early majority.

In an e-commerce context, HCD results in higher sales as customers find what they need more easily.

HCD helps to avoid resistance to new products in the workplace

As many companies will have discovered, the user interface is an easy target for complaints by employees. It may become the unwanted focus of attention, and be turned into an excuse to resist changes in work practices. Taking into account the user's requirements and needs mitigates the risk of this happening.

Reduced cost of support

Creating user assistance (user documentation, online help or e-learning) and running call centers is costly. Although they are often unavoidable, the volume and cost of user assistance and support can be considerably reduced by designing the product for intuitive understanding from the very start.

Reduced cost of design and development

HCD reduces design and development costs by:

  • Avoiding lengthy discussions among stakeholders through a healthy focus on the user, not on the politics
  • Avoiding the design and building of functions that users do not truly require
  • Detecting problems with the user experience before a single line of code is written

Increased job satisfaction and employee pride

Working with state-of-the-art tools that are adequate for the job can increase employees' pride in their organisation and work. New employees, particularly those fresh out of school, would rather not be confronted with antiquated tools and obscure procedures.

Giving organisations a more human face

Although user-friendly applications can give all organisations a more human face, this is especially the case for governments. Well designed e-government applications benefit all citizens. Governments, more than any other type of organisation, have the pressing duty to behave well towards their customers.

Sources

Good sources of information on the value of HCD are available here:

  • On the site of the Usability Professionals Association -- a US organisation that does excellent work -- is a chapter on the Business Benefits of Usability.
  • The good people of the military (the UK Defense Department) also published a nice brochure on Cost Arguments and Evidence for Human Factors Integration. Human Factors Integration is their way of saying: “applying methods of HCD to the design of products.” Human Factors Engineering is a rather old-fashioned way of designating HCD, but is still very much used in the domain of complex and critical systems.