What is Human-Centered Design?
If you’re a business owner, you know how important it is to reach the right people with the right message.
No matter what business you’re in, people should be the lens through which you sell, serve, and recruit. You won’t succeed without this focus. Incorporating human-centered design into the core of your business is the best way to connect with people to gain their trust, loyalty, and business.
Simply put, human-centered design puts people’s wants, needs, and preferences at the center of every decision you make.
Building a website with this mindset requires a deep understand of human behavior, and it’s not one that every business owner possesses. Yet understanding how and why people do what they do is foundational to human-centered design.
Writing, designing, and branding a website with people in mind helps you design solutions that resonate with your intended market. They buy what you sell, embrace your solutions, and return for more.
You may love your website, but it doesn’t matter if people are confused, bored, or annoyed when they use it. You may think it looks great and sounds good, but do the people you’re trying to reach agree?
Human-centered design helps you guess less and create a website experience people love.
Here are 3 ways to infuse human-centered design in your website design.
Watch them work. Ask your friends and family to browse your website while you watch. See how quickly (or slowly) they scroll. See what buttons they click. Notice their facial expressions and body language. Notice where they get stuck and they flow. Just observe. Watching what they do and how they engage with the site is critical to human-centered design. Your web designer, marketing team, or you (if you DIY’d your site) may have anticipated people would use the site differently than they do in real life. Ask them questions afterwards to confirm your observations, but keying in on their actions is step one in human-centered design.
Brainstorm solutions. Based on your observations, brainstorm ways to make your site more people-friendly. Don’t judge the ideas! The more you come up with the better you will be at problem-solving. Human behavior is predictably unpredictable. To account for this, businesses must be willing to iterate. Human-centered design relies on a willingness to swap your ideas for ideas that work. Consider all the ways you show empathy and authority with your content — two keys to gaining the trust of your customers.
Take action. Take your list of ideas and implement one or two of them. Change the wording on a call to action button or shorten a product description. Swap “insider” language for concrete words people understand. Make sure there’s a CTA above the fold and clarity in your headline about what you do and who you serve. After you make these changes, ask the same people to review your site again, and gather a new group to review it as well. Continue to keep people in mind as you make changes and observe to become more skilled at human-centered design.
Human-centered design is critical to the success of every business. Nonprofits need a great website, as do ministries, coaches, and consultants. Your website shows people how much you care about them. When you put people at the center of your design decisions, they are more likely to have a great website experience and engage with you again and again.
Do you want another set of eyes on your website?
Send us a link to your website and we’ll review it for free. When we’re done we’ll schedule a 30-minute call to share our ideas for adding more human-centered design to your site and business.
We help you create a website experience people love.
