Putting People at the Heart of Policy Design

Using Human-Centered Design to Serve All

Jamie Munger, Rudi Van Dael

• Publisher: Asian Development Bank
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9789292624095
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

The basic premise of human-centered design is to put beneficiaries at the heart of the design process. For policies and projects, a human-centered design approach can increase the positive impact on people's lives by contributing to a deeper understanding of their challenges, aspirations, and dreams. This book aims to support policy makers to apply human-centered design methods. Part 1 discusses principles and methods and features real-world practical examples. Part 2 presents a case study on Indonesia's maritime sector to demonstrate the benefits of applying human-centered design methods.

CHAPTER 1

NAVIGATING INNOVATION CHAOS

Innovation is messy. Organizations rely on human-centered design to navigate this ambiguity. This chapter introduces the framework and the value it brings.

WHAT IS HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN?

Human-centered design is an empathic approach to innovation. It is a way for policy makers to stay in line with human values, despite shifting trends and social currents, by putting beneficiaries at the center of the discovery and development process. The human-centered design framework integrates a broad set of practices around understanding the needs, wants, and limitations of the end-users. These insights ultimately result in solutions that are more likely to be adopted and embraced by the people who use them.

In the past decade, human-centered design—also known as design thinking—has become synonymous with the term innovation. Innovation, like anything new, is ambiguous, confusing, and sometimes painfully chaotic. Human-centered design is a creative framework for navigating the fuzzy front end of new initiatives by keeping the focus trained on the needs of the end-users. It provides a strategic North Star, bringing work streams and decision makers back to the value created for the end-user.

Figure 1: Benefits of Human-Centered Design

These are the four types of value that human-centered design brings to decision-making.

Source: Jamie Munger.

In-person research with end-users—sometimes called contextual inquiry or ethnographic interviewing—is the most common research method for human-centered design (photo courtesy of Emergent Design).

Shifting Focus from the Organization to the End-User

Human-centered design is sometimes called user-centered design or even people-centered design. These terms challenge organizations to change their frame of reference. Organizations tend to define people through the interactions they have with their products and services. Terms like “customer,” “patient,” or “passenger” define people from the perspective of the organization. Switching lenses to the end-users’ perspective acknowledges that people have needs and motivations outside of their interactions with a product or service and reveals to organizations a new definition of their value and role.

Identifying the Right Problem to Solve

Seeing situations from the human’s perspective (not the organization’s) reveals a brand-new understanding of the problem needing a better solution. Identifying the right problem to solve is a crucial step toward knowing how to successfully address it.

To frame problems, human-centered design depends primarily on qualitative insights. These are gleaned from in-depth interviews, observations, and creative activities with end-users. Insights reflecting the individuals’ realities, drawn from qualitative research, will reveal unexpected connections. They describe tensions between what people aspire toward and what they are constrained by.

Insights are a way to understand a problem in a new light. This new frame of reference leads organizations to develop more effective solutions that improve situations for their end-users.

Developing new insights requires new ways of thinking. Human-centered design has a wide variety of methods and frameworks for looking at people and situations in new ways. One of these is the “quad four” framework, developed by Kim Erwin, which offers four distinct lenses through which to look at situations: activities, ambitions, anxieties, and attitudes. These lenses cover a meaningful range of human factors—cognitive, behavioral, and emotional—to see people and situations holistically.³

Delivering on the Bottom Line

The world’s leading technology companies, health-care providers, and financial institutions have built human-centered design into their way of doing business. The framework of designing with users was embraced first by the private sector and now increasingly by the public and social sectors as well.

Why Is That?

In the private sector, where the bottom line is revenue and shareholder value, designing with and for end-users helps business build stronger brands, differentiated products, better customer experiences, and higher customer engagement. All of these outcomes translate into monetizable value toward the bottom line.⁴

Delivering on Policy Objectives

In the public sector, the bottom line is about achieving policy objectives. Policy is made for the benefit of millions of people, yet its impact is not one-size-fits-all. In complex systems, the best intentions can lead to unintended consequences for citizens.

Human-centered design provides a greater understanding of how citizens experience policies and government services by developing insights about their pain points, aspirations, and behaviors. It informs decision makers about the needs and experiences of their constituents. Prioritizing these insights, rather than relying on those of a detached expert, helps to steer policy toward more human solutions.

Policy can be interpreted and implemented at the service level in ways that are not necessarily aligned with the underlying intent. During implementation, human-centered design aligns policy objectives with the ways people experience them through services and programs.

Figure 2: The Four As

Kim Erwin developed the Quad Four Framework, which offers four distinct lenses through which to look at situations.

Source: Jamie Munger, based on the Quad Four Framework as found in K. Erwin. 2013. Communicating the New: Methods to Shape and Accelerate Innovation. Hoboken: Wiley.

Making a Case for Change

Creating value for people requires creating value for institutions as well. In developing new solutions, human-centered design seeks to strike a balance between three competing forces: desirability, feasibility, and viability. The solutions that emerge from a human-centered process should hit the overlap between these forces and thereby create a case for change not only through the human perspective, but also from the perspective of the organization.

Desirable: Will people use it? Does it solve existing problems? Is it trustworthy? Is it intuitive? Is it culturally appropriate?

Viable: Can the organization afford it? Will it make money? Will it be cost-effective? Will the institution, accrediting body, and governing boards approve, support, and endorse our plan?

Feasible: Can it technically be done by our organization? Does it identify roadblocks that can be overcome realistically?

Figure 3: Venn Diagram of Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability

Source: Jamie Munger.

CASE STUDY

Research with young professionals in Mumbai, India, to understand priorities for the home (photo courtesy of Emergent Design).

The brand was selling them something that was fundamentally at odds with their aspirations.

Many years ago, my team^a worked with a seminal brand in India which, one generation ago, represented the very definition of high-quality items for the home, like appliances and furniture. The brand had not managed to capture the attention of the up-and-coming generation in the same way. To put it bluntly, twentysomething urbanites were not interested in buying this brand’s refrigerators, sofas, bedroom sets, and washing machines.

The company suspected these new earners saw their brand as old-fashioned, something their mom and dad would buy and therefore not aspirational for young professionals living on their own for the first time. They perceived the problem to be that young people did not think their brand was cool. But did young people perceive it in the same way?

My team spent several weeks learning about twentysomething urbanites living in Mumbai by visiting their homes and talking with them about what was important, aspirational, functional, and valuable during this phase of their lives. Seeing the situation from their perspective, we learned “coolness” was not the problem. Not at all. The problem was that the brand was selling them something that was fundamentally at odds with their aspirations.

What was most important to these ambitious, young professionals was not to be “cool”—it was to be able to say “yes” to new opportunities as they arose. They prepared for this by living sparsely so, when the moment came, they would feel unconflicted about saying “yes,” packing up, and moving. They compensated by sleeping on the floor instead of owning a bed, storing their clothes in cardboard boxes instead of owning a closet, and eating take out for every meal instead of owning a refrigerator and a stove.

Seeing the situation from the end-user’s perspective, especially their aspirations and concerns, redefined what the brand should focus on. Rather than design a “cool” new sofa or washing machine, the team designed an innovative new service that sells, delivers, buys back, picks up, and resells secondhand furniture and appliances, thus providing some home comforts while liberating young people from the burden of ownership and the pain of moving.

^a The team comprised the author, Jamie Munger; Emergent Design; and the brand staff.

CHAPTER 2

PURPOSE AND PROCESS

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Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Navigating Innovation Chaos
• 2 Purpose and Process
• 3 Process Deep Dive
• 4 Case Study
• 5 Lessons Learned
• Featured Further Reading
• Further Reading
• Sources
• About the Authors
• Footnotes
• Back Cover