“Human-centered design is a creative approach to problem solving […] It’s a process that starts with the people you’re designing for and ends with new solutions that are tailor made to suit their needs.”
Human-Centered Design (HCD) has been a buzzword in the design community for years. In short, HCD is a mindset anyone can adopt to solve problems and find solutions that meet human needs. In practice, it often starts with a hypothesis about a problem or challenge, and is followed by research to investigate that hypothesis — similar to the scientific method taught in elementary schools.
Today, Human-Centered Design is commonly applied to solve design challenges for mobile applications, websites, and services. I like to think of it as a “people first” design process. The opposite would be a “solutions first” process.
Human-Centered Design example:
“We hypothesize that low-income families struggle to find healthy, affordable food available in their local grocery store. How can we help them?”
Solutions-first design example:
“Let’s create a grocery shopping app.”
The human-centered approach is far more likely to become a successful solution, for what I hope is obvious reasons. When you start with solutions, you miss out on crucial insights that could help you decide what features to create in a product, what the visual look and feel should be, and how to shape the voice of the brand so that it all appeals to the target audience.
Content and the Human-Centered Design process
When I first left my corporate job to start a consulting business, I found myself having to explain exactly what I meant by terms like “content strategy” and “content design.”
After some guidance from a brilliant business strategist, I started to use my process as a way to explain my work.
“I start with user research,” I’d say, “to uncover what needs, goals, and questions your audience has. Then, I use those insights to create a master plan for all your content and define things like your messaging strategy and website architecture. This process aligns content with real user needs so you can easily achieve your business goals.”
After many of these conversations, I started hearing the same feedback from potential clients and peers.
Applying HCD to content: a process to follow
Since those early days, I’ve leaned in to the idea that my work as a content strategist or content designer is really just applying HCD to content.
Thinking in terms of “human-centered content” has solved a lot of challenges for me when it comes to defining my work — or at least, my version of content strategy and content design.
I realized that yes, it’s basically a blend of the Design Thinking process and the Human-Centered Design process with a content-edge. I empathize with users first, make sense of the research, create a plan, prototype the content, then test and improve if I can.
What I love about framing my work in terms of a design process is that is overcomes a lot of misconceptions. Content strategy is not a deliverable. It’s not a “phase” in a project. It’s not a document. It’s a flexible process to solve content challenges that puts human needs at the forefront.
The solutions first approach to content is designing a wireframe for a website, then “dropping in” content later. The human-centered approach starts starts by doing research about what content people need and want, then designs a wireframe around that content.
If you have content challenges to solve, here are a few principles I’ve defined in the last few years as central components to human-centered content.
Three Principles of Human-Centered Content
So, what really makes content human-centered? Aside from following a human-centered process, I like to evaluate the success (or “human-centered-ness”) of content in a three key ways. I think of these as more like guiding principles rather than a checklist.
1. Human-centered content supports user questions and tasks
Human-centered content prioritizes user questions and tasks, because those are the main reasons why someone will use an interface.
Whether it’s a website, an app, an internal web portal, people mainly care about themselves — not your business. You can be human-centered by prioritizing content that answers their questions or supports their tasks.
Examples of user questions:
- What does your business do?
- Is your business close to my house?
- What are your business hours?
- What is on your menu?
- How can you help me?
Examples of user tasks:
- I need to update my mailing address at my bank
- I need to schedule an appointment
- I need to create a new profile for my employee
- I need to send someone a document to e-sign
2. Human-centered content is relevant to the user
Outside of questions and tasks, all content should still be created through the lens of, “how can we make this relevant to our user?”
Consider a company About Page, for example. Lots of businesses love to talk about their company’s origin story, the awards they have achieved, their certifications, etc. Chances are, if someone is looking for a new insurance company, they don’t care much about industry certifications they have never heard of.
If you must include content on your website that is not directly answering a question or supporting a user task, find a way to put a user-centered spin on it. Don’t just tell the user you have a certification. Tell them why they should care and how it helps them.
Relevant content is also:
- In a voice and tone the user will enjoy
- In a format the user will expect and understand
3. Human-centered content is accessible and inclusive
Humans are not all the same. As much as we all love personas, they will never represent every single person who sees your content.
Some humans won’t be able to hear the audio on your videos. Other humans might not be able to see the screen, and use things like screen readers to help them. There’s a great wide spectrum of human capabilities out there, and they are all equally wonderful.
To be truly human-centered, your content needs to be, at minimum, accessible to all humans. In other words, they should be able to access and understand the information in some way regardless of their physical or cognitive abilities. At best, human-centered content is inclusive and welcoming.
To make your content more accessible:
- Use alternate text for images
- Use captions and transcripts for videos
- Prioritize important information in headings and subheads
- Avoid jargon, acronyms, and complex sentences
- Write descriptive and specific Call-to-Action copy (example: instead of “read more” you can say “read about accessibility”)
For more on content accessibility, check out the Readability Guidelines by Content Design London. For more on web accessibility, read Introduction to Web Accessibility. Also, see 7 Guidelines for Writing Accessible Microcopy.
To make your content more inclusive:
- Avoid gendered language when it’s not needed
- Asking for gender or race in a form? Explain why and include write-in options
- Avoid phrases and idioms that won’t translate well if your audience speaks English as a second language
Problems with this terminology and other final thoughts
To wrap things up, those are my thoughts now on how we can apply HCD to content and think about content in human-centered terms. But like anything else, it’s not perfect.
For one, I’ve kind of meshed and merged “Design Thinking” and “HCD” together in this article and in my own brain. Some people might not like that, and that’s fair. I also know that the term “user-centered” might make more sense to some people.
To zoom out a bit, we’ve also got lots of confusing terms in the content industry already. Introducing “human-centered content” as a new term could just mix things up even more. That’s also fair.
All that said, I’ve personally found it to be a nice way to explain my work and think about my own process. Perhaps for some of you out there will find it useful too.
Source : uxplanet.org
Author : Veronica Cámara
