Methods & Approaches

Digital projects sometimes fail not because they are disfunctional, but because no one needs them. For your digital projects to succeed, you need the right methods and approaches in addition to the right technology.

Design Thinking or Human-Centered Design?

Even though both approaches are treated as two different working methods, they have much in common and can be reconciled. And both have their benefits for your innovation process! So why not combine them and get the best of both worlds for your work? Take a look at the two approaches - where they differ and where they go hand in hand.

Design Thinking

The basic idea of design thinking is that interdisciplinary teams can create outstanding innovations. It is a solution-oriented method to solve complex problems by benefiting from different professional perspectives. This is not so much about the detailed elaboration of ideas, but rather the extensive experimentation and development of great ideas.

learn more about Design Thinking

Human-Centered Design

For human-centered design or human-centered design, the ultimate goal is to deeply embed customer-centricity in a company. This includes a culture of open knowledge sharing and collaboration between all departments inside and outside the company. The result is a product that meets users' needs and even exceeds their expectations.

Learn more Human Centered Design

Differences

So what is the difference between the two approaches? In a nutshell, the perspective of design thinking is broader than that of human-centered design. The former focuses on innovation and creation and deals with the development of new products, services and even solutions to social problems.

The focus here is on improving the user-friendliness and user experience of a particular product or service. So we have two different areas that are treated similarly. So it makes more sense to focus on the commonalities.

Commonalities

Design thinking and human-centered design are easy to combine because they have many things in common. First, both approaches require user and stakeholder involvement in all phases of the development process - from analysis to evaluation. It is precisely this development process that is the second and no less important common feature. Both approaches follow an iterative process.

Human-centered design comprises four phases, which are repeated until the optimal result is achieved:

(1) develop the application context
(2) understand requirements
(3) conceive product design solutions and
(4) evaluate designs.

The design thinking process, on the other hand, follows six iterative phases:

(1) understand
(2) observe
(3) define the point of view
(4) generate ideas
(5) create a prototype
(6) test

Even if the number of phases is different, the actions of the phases overlap. The initial situation plays an important role in both processes, and each one involves the analysis of the problem, the characteristics of the users, and the analysis of the usage environment. In addition, both approaches work with a prototype of the developed product, which they use to test the result with real users.

Conclusion

Design thinking and human-centered design are not mutually exclusive, but complement each other. In particular, teams can first identify visions and solution approaches through design thinking. Second, human-centered design can lead to concrete user-centered implementation.
In this way, you can ensure one thing in the innovation process: Your idea develops into an innovative product that offers customers and users added value.