PART III – An HCD process for life sciences design

Through innovation to brand value

In a series of inspiring TED Talks between 2009 and 2012, Tim Brown, Don Norman, Gerhard Beckau and David Kelley variously illustrated HCD’s potential for profound changes in product development, promoting the genuine innovation that McKinsey has identified as the principal driver of corporate growth and market success.

Further, the user-centric approach that recognizes expectations and context from the start, is more likely to result in products that do not merely satisfy consumers but actively delight them. This is a further key component in creating the elusive brand value that is so instrumental in increasing the worth of companies.

HCD vs conventional design

HCD is distinguished from conventional approaches through the intense, systematic focus on continuous iteration, from the start, of prototype creation, evaluation and correction. Overall, this saves both time and money.

Market surveys and a user-centered design approach can also be applied to revisions of introduced products. The density of interfaces connected with the user makes it possible to tap a huge potential in the services business segment, above all in the medical technology and pharmaceuticals industry. Since the various interest groups (patients, physicians, caregivers, investors, company representatives, etc.) have such diverse concepts of value, this potential can only be fully tapped with user-oriented approaches.

The decision on whether to use an HCD or conventional design approach will depend on honest answers to three key questions:

• Why should HCD be used for development?
• What values can result from development according to an HCD approach?
• Is HCD more efficient than conventional approaches in avoiding risks in the user environment?

Design thinking

Stanford Design School describes design thinking as striving to balance optimize feasibility (what is functionally possible within time and budget), profitability (a sustainable business model), appeal (what makes sense for people and society) and innovation.

School Head, Professor David Kelley, has found that design thinking provides new capacity to see and exploit opportunities and foster both incremental and disruptive innovation. The most effective innovation boosters are cross-functional teams and what he calls “T-shaped persons” individuals who possess knowledge horizontally distributed over various disciplines and vertical in-depth knowledge in at least one of them.

His IDEO co-founder Tom Moggridge sees design thinking as a defined, systematic and problem-oriented process for generating innovation that is based on methods from technology and design, combining ideas from art, tools from the social sciences and insights from the business world. The most important pillars of this iterative process are early prototyping and usability tests.

The HCD process

IDEO at Palo Alto originally conceived the design thinking process as Inspiration (what we need), followed by Ideation (how will it work?) and finally Implementation (can we build and ship it?)

Donald Norman’s 1989 model that coined the term “user-centered design” defined the Inspiration phase as recognizing all dimensions of a problem, motivating the search for solutions. He saw the Ideation phase as forming, developing, and trialing alternative solutions, focusing user tests primarily on aligning solutions with user needs. From here, he saw Implementation as the path to a market-ready product.

Nearly 20 years later, David Kelley evolved the process further into five steps:

• Step 1: Understanding current perception of market, customers and technology of the task with perceived limitations that can be addressed later in the project.
• Step 2: Observe people in real situations and figure out what confuses them, what they like, what they reject, what interests them.
• Step 3: Visualize how the new concepts are used by the customers, assisted by prototypes, computerized presentations and simulation models.
• Step 4: Evaluate the visualizations to refine the concept for the target market. The primary goal here is to identify which ideas work, which don’t, which ideas confuse, and which have good usability characteristics.
• Step 5: Implement the new concept for commercialization: the longest and technically most challenging part of the process.

Since then, Stanford school has further refined design thinking into five phases in which the first two are particularly important:

1. Empathize: Identify potential users and their requirements, along with their emotions and behaviors.
2. Define: Analyse and structure the results of the Empathy phase to facilitate deep understanding of user environments and underlying conditions and therefore define the requirements and problems.
3. Ideate: Generate ideas to solve identified user problems to exploit collective perspective on the range of options. In this phase the team should have a diverse and multidisciplinary composition.
4. Prototype: Trial one or more prototype ideas with real users in real environments. This flexible phase may use a variety of techniques including Post It notes, role-play, model room, object analogy, interface maquette, and storyboarding. The key here is to harmonize trialing in step with project progress generate early feedback and learning to guide the designers.
5. Test: This is the last phase before market launch and is the opportunity to further refine and improve detailed solutions, conducted with refined models to make it possible to recognize and learn even more about the user and his involvement.

These last three phases (Ideate, Prototype, Test) are to be conducted as iterative loops as often as necessary.

HCD Training and support

As a practitioner and disciple of HCD, passionate about its transformative potential, Erdmann Solutions Design, is committed to discussing these methods with the assistance of experts and users.

It uses ongoing lectures and workshops to instruct and assist companies in the execution of HCD. In collaboration with anatomy labs, Erdmann Solutions offers courses in creativity-fostering techniques and development methods, illustrated by successful practical examples and hands-on participation in projects.

These help to develop complex medical treatments and pharmaceutical delivery systems using design thinking in a user-oriented way, continually improved or excluded as alternative solutions for medical technology and pharmaceutical companies.

Resources

Click on Human Centered Design by Raimund Erdmann to access full Red Book eBook.
Click on www.erdmann.ch for further details.