What the heck is HCD?

Human-Centered Design (HCD) is an adaptable, scalable, and highly effective approach to problem-solving that involves the human perspective from start to finish. Smart leaders use Human-Centered Design to solve many challenges. Examples include:

To connect with and to empower employees,
To hone in on customer wants and needs,
To determine what to create next for customers, and
To know the touchpoints that turn a customer into a fan.

Why It Works

The highly effective HCD process works because it’s human centric. It focuses on the people affected by the problem and helps you embrace your empathic nature. You learn to:

Identify with those who feel pain,
Think differently in addressing that pain, and
Take informed action to resolve that pain.

Translation, please? HCD helps you think and be different.

Our HCD approach will guide you to

Simple right? Not so fast. There are a ton of ways to screw it up.

Once you start to apply the HCD method, questions pop up.

Do I need all that research?
How do I talk to my customers or employees?
How do I effectively concept solutions without going overboard?
How do I prototype just enough?

And there will be more, we promise. That’s where we come in.

We have decades of experience fine-tuning HCD’s use for specific challenges. We’ve got you. You don’t need to be a designer, and you don’t need an in-house design team. We’ll guide you, coach your team, and support you through it. We take the complex and make it simple.

How Does HCD Help You?

The HCD method—used by the world’s leading organizations—provides a flexible, repeatable, time-tested method for solving complex business challenges. We think that’s pretty good. Oh, you mean besides that.

Here’s what else makes the HCD method so valuable. Human Centered Design is:

Human-centric

Your business will connect with people. Your bottom line will thank you.

Adaptable

You can use HCD in any context, and you won’t need a new system for every new problem.

Holistic

You address problems from all perspectives with HCD. It’s like doing a puzzle and putting every piece in its place.

Widely-used

There are more HCD case studies than you can imagine. Have a look here. They’ll make you feel good.

Iterative

Throughout your engagement, new problems and questions will arise. You continue to apply the HCD process every step of the way.

Empowering

When you learn to break problems down to simple components and examine them with a human-centric approach, you gain confidence.

How Do You Know You Need HCD?

As humans, we may not see trouble until it lands in our lap. However, the best leaders get it. They usually have a gut feeling that something’s off even if they can’t identify the actual something.

Here are a few signs we’ve seen over the years:

Blurred Vision

Your organization is losing sight of its core vision. It feels like you’re chasing “innovation,” without any real meaning behind it.

Stalled Progress

You built your business on a set of principles that are now a bottleneck to progress.

Out-of-Date Thinking

Your core products, services, and internal processes run on old assumptions. But things are not working anymore.

People Gaps

There’s a knowledge gap between your business and your customers, and it’s showing up in your bottom line.

When you work with us, you’ll learn to apply HCD throughout your organization. Let’s get started!

Better Together

At CX by Design, we’re customer experience design experts with a wicked coffee habit. We offer multiple options to get your business thinking about and solving product, service, and organizational problems differently.

Get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.

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