Human center design for solving social issues in the digital era.
HCD or “Human Center Design” is a discipline that started as a change of paradigm that went from a passive customer to a more involved and active “user” or “persona”. The accelerations in communications with the arrival of social networks and more ways of people having the opportunity to give their feedback and share information, create a more mature user with mature needs to fulfill. The same happened in the social arena, citizens used to good solutions in the private sector, asking for the same treatment from government-related services.
In the design field, new terms like “User Experience” appeared. Solutions started to be thought with the necessities of the users in mind, with the human in the center of the process. But with this trend evolving, is it possible to use the basics of UX principles to get better and apply it to resolve social, political and economic issues or give better services to citizens?
For Vanesa Colina UX Designer, the short answer is yes. She started her career as a graphic designer and in the last few years, she focused on UX and UI, specializing in user research for mobile applications that use emerging technologies.
“If you go beyond user experience; the user experience is a user-centric methodology, but it’s not the only one. It’s not the only methodology. Is one within a set of tools. So you also have design thinking, you also have lean startup, you have other kinds of methodologies as well. So it depends on what you’re doing and what you have available to you”
Vanesa Colina, UX Designer
Talking about applications, she mentioned that in the United States, there are a few examples of applications of user experience and all of the other methodologies in the social sector, specifically within the government. Under the Obama administration, the US government started a team called the United States Digital Service team. And their mission or what they do is they ran user-centered design into government. Colina explained: “It all started out of a crisis that they went through with the website of healthcare.gov. They launched this website and it was a failure in technical terms. And they had spent an enormous amount of money on that website. So that crisis or that case exposed everything that wasn’t working within the government in terms of just creating technology for the sake of creating technology, and not having good standards and not understanding who was going to use what they were doing“.
“when you apply UX in those areas, you have a mix of working with your clients being the government and then your end-users being the citizens, which are two completely different sets of users, it is more like Business to Business model instead of a Business to Client UX practice.”
Vanesa Colina, UX Designer.
United States is not the only country applying these principles. Prior to that, the UK government created its own digital team to bring their, user-centric methodologies as well. And they don´t use just UX, they applied all of the methodologies. For the UK government was another case, it wasn’t only healthcare, it was a whole government website that was not working. A congresswoman created a plan and that proposal was all of the structure of the first data team that was able to bring their user-centric methodologies into the government. As Colina adds, “it is always the same story. There’s one crisis that merits a drastic change in how things are doing right now. So I’ve never seen an establishment like government policymakers or even Academia make that change without going through a really public crisis.”
That is the bright side of a crisis, it always brings a change. Now the UK government counts with a Government Digital Service (GDS) branch that is in charge of leading the digital transformation of government.
These two examples, the US government, and the UK government are real applications of human-centered design applied to solve complex issues. They’re solving social issues, issues that have a lot of politics involved, that not only influences by changes public policy. And is all based on user-centric design.