How to design human-centered products and services?

Empathy is the centerpiece of a human-centered design process. The Empathize mode is the work that we do to understand people: What they need physically and emotionally, how they do things, and why. How they think about things, and what is meaningful to them. The best solutions come out of the best insights into human behaviour. Good designs are built on a solid understanding of the beliefs and values of the users.

Ideation is the part of the Design Thinking process where we concentrate on the generation of ideas. It's a process of going wide in terms of concepts and outcomes. Particularly early in a project, ideation is about pushing for the widest and wildest range of ideas from which you can select. It's not about simply finding a single, best solution. We step beyond obvious solutions and thus increase the innovation potential by uncovering unexpected areas of exploration. The best solution will be discovered later, through user testing and feedback.

We put the prototypes in the hands of the users. We let them interpret the prototype and watch how they use, handle, and interact with the prototype. We listen to what they say about it and what questions they have. This is how we learn even more about the users and often get unexpected insights. Testing also helps to find out whether we framed the actual problem correctly. If not, we cycle back.