Dan Dixon and Stéphan Willemse: HCD is dead, long live HCD

As product managers, we all know the struggle of truly understanding our users. It's the cornerstone of everything we do, yet the path to those valuable insights can often feel like navigating a maze. The endless back-and-forth emails, the constant asking for favors from other teams, and the sheer time spent trying to find the right people to talk to, sound familiar? For years, this was our reality. But there’s a better way, Optimal's participant recruitment is a game-changer, transforming your approach to user research and freeing you to focus on what truly matters: understanding our users.

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The Challenge We All Faced

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User research processes often hit a significant bottleneck: finding participants. Like many, you may rely heavily on sales and support teams to connect you with users. While they were always incredibly helpful, this approach has its limitations. It creates internal dependencies, slows down timelines, and often means you are limited to a specific segment of our user base. You frequently find ourselves asking, "Does anyone know someone who fits this profile?" which inevitably leads to delays and sometimes, missed crucial feedback opportunities.

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A Game-Changing Solution: Optimal's Participant Recruitment

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Enter Optimal's participant recruitment. This service fundamentally shifts how you approach user research, offering a hugely increased level of efficiency and insight. Here’s how it can level up your research process:

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• Diverse Participant Pool: Gone are the days of repeatedly reaching out to the same familiar faces. Optimal Workshop provides access to a global pool of participants who genuinely represent our target audience. The fresh perspectives and varied experiences gained can be truly eye-opening, uncovering insights you might have otherwise missed.
• Time-Saving Independence: The constant "Does anyone know someone who...?" emails are a thing of the past. You now have the autonomy to independently recruit participants for a wide range of research activities, from quick prototype tests to more in-depth user interviews and usability studies. This newfound independence dramatically accelerates your research timeline, allowing you to gather feedback much faster.
• Faster Learning Cycles: When a critical question arises, or you need to quickly validate a new concept, you can now launch research and recruit participants almost immediately. This quick turnaround means you’re making informed decisions based on real user feedback at a much faster pace than ever before. This agility is invaluable in today's fast-paced product development environment.
• Reduced Bias: By accessing external participants who have no prior relationship with your company, you're receiving more honest and unfiltered feedback. This unbiased perspective is crucial for making confident, user-driven decisions and avoiding the pitfalls of internal assumptions.

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Beyond Just Recruitment: A Seamless Research Ecosystem

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The participant recruitment service integrates with the Optimal platform. Whether you're conducting tree testing to evaluate information architecture, running card sorting exercises to understand user mental models, or performing first-click tests to assess navigation, everything is available within one intuitive platform. It really can become your one-stop shop for all things user research.

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Building a Research-First Culture

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Perhaps the most unexpected and significant benefit of streamlined participant recruitment comes from the positive shift in your team's culture. With research becoming so accessible and efficient, you're naturally more inclined to validate our assumptions and explore user needs before making key product decisions. Every product decision is now more deeply grounded in real user insights, fostering a truly user-centric approach throughout your development process.

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The Bottom Line

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If you're still wrestling with the time-consuming and often frustrating process of participant recruitment for your user research, why not give Optimal Workshop a try. It can transform what is a significant bottleneck in your workflow into a streamlined and efficient process that empowers you to build truly user-centric products. It's not just about saving time; it's about gaining deeper, more diverse insights that ultimately lead to better products and happier users. Give it a shot, you might be surprised at the difference it makes.

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We all know that building a robust information architecture (IA) can make or break your product. And getting it right can rely on robust user research. Especially when it comes to creating human-centered, intuitive products that deliver outstanding user experiences.

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But what are the best methods to test your information architecture? To make sure that your focus is on building an information architecture that is truly based on what your users want, and need.

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What is user research? 🗣️🧑🏻💻

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With all the will in the world, your product (or website or mobile app) may work perfectly and be as intuitive as possible. But, if it is only built on information from your internal organizational perspective, it may not measure up in the eyes of your user. Often, organizations make major design decisions without fully considering their users. User research (UX) backs up decisions with data, helping to make sure that design decisions are strategic decisions. 

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Testing your information architecture can also help establish the structure for a better product from the ground up. And ultimately, the performance of your product. User experience research focuses your design on understanding your user expectations, behaviors, needs, and motivations. It is an essential part of creating, building, and maintaining great products. 

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Taking the time to understand your users through research can be incredibly rewarding with the insights and data-backed information that can alter your product for the better. But what are the key user research methods for your information architecture? Let’s take a look.

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Research methods for information architecture ⚒️

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There is more than one way to test your IA. And testing with one method is good, but with more than one is even better. And, of course, the more often you test, especially when there are major additions or changes, you can tweak and update your IA to improve and delight your user’s experience.

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Card Sorting 🃏

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Card sorting is a user research method that allows you to discover how users understand and categorize information. It’s particularly useful when you are starting the planning process of your information architecture or at any stage you notice issues or are making changes. Putting the power into your users’ hands and asking how they would intuitively sort the information. In a card sort, participants sort cards containing different items into labeled groups. You can use the results of a card sort to figure out how to group and label the information in a way that makes the most sense to your audience. 

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There are a number of techniques and methods that can be applied to a card sort. Take a look here if you’d like to know more.

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Card sorting has many applications. It’s as useful for figuring out how content should be grouped on a website or in an app as it is for figuring out how to arrange the items in a retail store.You can also run a card sort in person, using physical cards, or remotely with online tools such as OptimalSort.

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Tree Testing 🌲

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Taking a look at your information architecture from the other side can also be valuable. Tree testing is a usability method for evaluating the findability of topics on a product. Testing is done on a simplified text version of your site structure without the influence of navigation aids and visual design.

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Tree testing tells you how easily people can find information on your product and exactly where people get lost. Your users rely on your information architecture – how you label and organize your content – to get things done.

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Tree testing can answer questions like:

• Do my labels make sense to people?
• Is my content grouped logically to people?
• Can people find the information they want easily and quickly? If not, what’s stopping them?

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Treejack is our tree testing tool and is designed to make it easy to test your information architecture. Running a tree test isn’t actually that difficult, especially if you’re using the right tool. You’ll  learn how to set useful objectives, how to build your tree, write your tasks, recruit participants, and measure results.

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Combining information architecture research methods 🏗

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If you are wanting a fully rounded view of your information architecture, it can be useful to combine your research methods.

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Tree testing and card sorting, along with usability testing, can give you insights into your users and audience. How do they think? How do they find their way through your product? And how do they want to see things labeled, organized, and sorted? 

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If you want to get fully into the comparison of tree testing and card sorting, take a look at our article here, which compares the options and explains which is best and when. 

There is strong backlash about the perceived failures of Human Centred Design (HCD) and its contribution to contemporary macro problems. There seems to be a straightforward connection: HCD and Design Thinking have been adopted by organizations and are increasingly part of product/experience development, especially in big tech. However the full picture is more complex, and HCD does have some issues.

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Dan Dixon, UX and Design Research Director and Stéphan Willemse, Strategy Director/Head of Strategy, both from the Digital Arts Network, recently spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, about the evolution and future of HCD.

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In their talk, Dan and Stéphan cover the history of HCD, its use today, and its limitations, before presenting a Post HCD future. What could it be, and how should it be different? Dan and Stéphan help us to step outside of ourselves as we meet new problems with new ways of Design Thinking.

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Dan Dixon and Stéphan Willemse bios

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Dan is a long-term practitioner of human-centred experience design and has a wealth of experience in discovery and qual research. He’s worked in academic, agency and client-side roles in both the UK and NZ, covering diverse fields such as digital, product design, creative technology and game design. His history has blended a background in the digital industry with creative technology teaching and user experience research. He has taken pragmatic real-world knowledge into a higher education setting as well as bringing deeper research skills from academia into commercial design projects. In higher education, as well as talks and workshops, Dan has been teaching and sharing these skills for the last 16 years. 

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Stéphan uses creativity, design and strategy to help organizations innovate towards positive, progressive futures. He works across innovation, experience design, emerging technologies, cultural intelligence and futures projects with clients including Starbucks, ANZ, Countdown, TradeMe and the public sector. He holds degrees in PPE, Development Studies, Education and an Executive MBA. However, he doesn’t like wearing a suit and his idea of the perfect board meeting is at a quiet surf break. He thinks ideas are powerful and that his young twins ask the best questions about the world we live in.

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Contact Details:

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Email: dan.dixon@digitalartsnetwork.com

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Find Dan on LinkedIn  

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HCD IS DEAD, LONG LIVE HCD 👑

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Dan and Stéphan take us through the evolving landscape of Human Centred Design (HCD) and Design Thinking. Can HCD effectively respond to the challenges of the modern era, and can we get ahead of the unintended consequences of our design? They examine the inputs and processes of design, not just the output, to scrutinize the very essence of design practice.

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A brief history of HCD

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In the 1950s and 1960s, designers began exploring the application of scientific processes to design, aiming to transform it into a systematic problem-solving approach. Later in the 1960s, design thinkers in Scandinavia initiated the shift towards cooperative and participative design practices. Collaboration and engagement with diverse stakeholders became integral to design processes. Then, the 1970s and 1980s marked a shift in perspective, viewing design as a fundamentally distinct way of approaching problems. 

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Moving into the late 1980s and 1990s, design thinking expanded to include user-centered design, and the idea of humans and technology becoming intertwined. Then the 2000s witnessed a surge in design thinking, where human-centered design started to make its mark.

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Limitations of the “design process”

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Dan and Stéphan discuss the “design squiggle”, a concept that portrays the messy and iterative nature of design, starting chaotically and gradually converging toward a solution. For 20 years, beginning in the early 90s, this was a popular way to explain how the design process feels. However, in the past 10 years or so, efforts to teach and pass down design processes have become common practice. Here enter concepts like the “double diamond” and “pattern problem”, which seek to be repeatable and process-driven. These neat processes, however, demand rigid adherence to specific design methods, which can ultimately stifle innovation. 

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Issues with HCD and its evolution

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The critique of such rigid design processes, which developed alongside HCD, highlights the need to acknowledge that humans are just one element in an intricate network of actors. By putting ourselves at the center of our design processes and efforts, we already limit our design. Design is just as much about the ecosystem surrounding any given problem as it is about the user. A limitation of HCD is that we humans are not actually at the center of anything except our own minds. So, how can we address this limitation?

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Post-anthropocentric design starts to acknowledge that we are far less rational than we believe ourselves to be. It captures the idea that there are no clear divisions between ‘being human’ and everything else. This concept has become important as we adopt more and more technology into our lives, and we’re getting more enmeshed in it. 

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Post-human design extends this further by removing ourselves from the center of design and empathizing with “things”, not just humans. This concept embraces the complexity of our world and emphasizes how we need to think about the problem just as much as we think about the solution. In other words, post-human design encourages us to “live” in our design problem(s) and consider multiple interventions.

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Finally, Dan and Stéphan discuss the concept of Planetary design, which stresses that everything we create, and everything we do, has the possibility to impact everything else in the world. In fact, our designs do impact everything else, and we need to try and be aware of all possibilities.

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Integrating new ways of thinking about design

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To think beyond HCD and to foster innovation in design, we can begin by embracing emerging design practices and philosophies such as "life-centered design," "Society-centered design," and "Humanity-centered design." These emerging practices have toolsets that are readily available online and can be seamlessly integrated into your design approach, helping us to break away from traditional, often linear, methodologies. Or, taking a more proactive stance, we can craft our own unique design tools and frameworks. 

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Why it matters 🎯

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To illustrate how design processes can evolve to meet current and future challenges of our time, Dan and Stéphan present their concept of “Post human-centered design” (Post HCD). At its heart, it seeks to take what's great about HCD and build upon it, all while understanding its issues/limitations.

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Dan and Stéphan put forward, as a starting point, some challenges for designers to consider as we move our practice to its next phase.

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Suggested Post HCD principles:

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• Human to context: Moving from human-centered to a context-centred or context sensitive point of view.
• Design Process to Design Behaviour: Not being beholden to design processes like the “double diamond”. Instead of thinking about designing for problems, we should design for behaviors instead. 
• Problem-solutions to Interventions: Thinking more broadly about interventions in the problem space, rather than solutions to the problems
• Linear to Dynamic: Understand ‘networks’ and complex systems.
• Repeated to Reflexive: Challenging status quo processes and evolving with challenges that we’re trying to solve.

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The talk wraps up by encouraging designers to incorporate some of this thinking into everyday practice. Some key takeaways are: 

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• Expand your web of context: Don’t just think about things having a center, think about networks.
• Have empathy for “things”: Consider how you might then have empathy for all of those different things within that network, not just the human elements of the network.
• Design practice is exploration and design exploration is our practice: Ensure that we're exploring both our practice as well as the design problem.
• Make it different every time: Every time we design, try to make it different, don't just try and repeat the same loop over and over again.

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