The Department of Housing and Public Works has released the latest edition of its Digital on Toast series, featuring human-centred design (HCD).
To illustrate its point, the Department’s Customer and Digital Group gives the example of an episode from the Simpsons television show in which Homer meets his long-lost half-brother, Herb Powell, a rich executive who owns Powell Motors, a declining automobile manufacturer with out-of-touch engineers.
Herb asks Homer to design a car for “all the Homer Simpsons out there”.
What should have been a moment of glory for customer-led design, turns out to be a failure so great it sends Powell Motors out of business.
So, what went wrong?
The Group says Homer designed a car for Homer; there was no discovery of people’s needs. While he could have spoken to the community, his friends, or his family, Homer instead based the design solely on his own personal wants.
“Designing from the inside out can create false predictions of future behaviour,” it says.
“Human-centred design is more than just what customers want; it’s also about what they do.
“During customer research they may tell you what they want out of a product or service, but that can be misleading as they may not really know what they want or what the possibilities are, and we may need to rely on their behaviour.
“When you know what customers actually do, you can design solutions that meet not only what customers think they want but also their unspoken needs.”
The Digital on Toast article said that by understanding what customers needed and what they did, Homer could have learned that he had pushed his design too far and iterated the design based on feedback, creating a better outcome and saving him from the giant ”Doh!” at launch.
To learn more about HCD, the Department’s Customer and Digital Group has designed a number of short online modules which can be accessed at this PS News link.
