Human-centered design
Designing from the needs, context and participation of the people who will use something.
Practice
How design is done: approaches, processes, methods and artifacts shared by several disciplines.
Approaches
General ways of tackling a design problem.
Design thinking
Tackling open problems the way design does: understanding people, ideating and prototyping.
User-centered design
Designing systems around the tasks and abilities of the people who use them, testing early and often.
Participatory design
Designing with the people affected as full partners, not just as informants.
Co-design
Designing together with the people who will live with the result, with tools so they can create too.
Research through design
Researching by designing: prototypes are used to generate knowledge, not just products.
EAST framework
To change a behavior, make it easy, attractive, social and timely.
Jobs to be done
Understanding what progress a person seeks in a situation and what they “hire” a product for.
Lean UX
Designing in short cycles of hypothesis, testing and learning, as a team and with little documentation.
Agile UX
Fitting research and design into the rhythm of agile development teams.
Design justice
Designing with the communities most affected, to share what design gives and takes more fairly.
Evidence-based design
Making design decisions based on the best available research, and measuring their effects afterward.
Value sensitive design
Taking into account the values of everyone affected throughout the design of a technology.
Privacy by design
Protecting personal data from the first sketch, with the most private option already set.
Processes
How the phases of a project are ordered.
Double Diamond
Open up and narrow down twice: first to find the right problem, then the solution.
Design sprint
Five days to go from an important problem to a prototype tested with real customers.
Lean Startup
Build the minimum, measure how people respond and learn, in short cycles.
Contextual Design
A complete process that goes from observing people at work to designing and testing the product.
Methods
Concrete techniques to research, synthesize, ideate or test.
Research
To get to know people and their context.
In-depth interview
A long, open conversation with one person to understand their experiences and motives.
Contextual inquiry
Observing and asking people questions while they do their work, in their own setting.
Shadowing
Following a person like their shadow for a while to observe what they do.
Ethnography
Spending time in people’s world to understand their daily life and culture from the inside.
Go-along
Accompany someone as they do something in their own setting, like shopping, and ask questions along the way.
Diary study
People record what they do and feel over days or weeks, as it happens.
Focus group
A moderated conversation with a small group to learn their opinions and how they influence each other.
Survey
The same questions to many people, to measure how many think or do something.
Mystery shopping
Someone poses as a customer to experience and evaluate the service as it is actually delivered.
Service safari
Going out to experience services firsthand to observe what works and what does not.
Benchmarking
Comparing how others solve the same thing, to learn from their successes and mistakes.
Horizon scanning
Continuously looking for signals of change outside your field to anticipate what may come.
Generative tools
Materials for people to make something, such as a collage, and express what is hard to put into words.
Analogous inspiration
Observing a place from another field that shares something with your problem, to see it with fresh eyes.
Trend research
Detecting and explaining changes in society, culture and consumption before they become widespread.
Futures wheel
A diagram for exploring the direct and indirect consequences of a change.
Stakeholder map
Drawing who can influence a project or be affected by it, and how they relate to each other.
Cultural probes
A pack of open-ended tasks that people complete on their own in daily life and send back.
Life cycle assessment (LCA)
Measures a product's environmental impact over its whole life, to know where to act when designing.
Extremes and mainstreams
Also talking to people at the extremes to see needs the average hides.
Hierarchical task analysis (HTA)
Breaks a task down into goals and subgoals, with the plan that says in what order they're done.
Delphi method
Consulting experts over several rounds of questionnaires, showing them the group’s answers each time.
Synthesize
To organize what was learned and give it shape.
Affinity diagram
Grouping research notes by affinity so that themes emerge.
Five whys
Asking “why?” several times in a row until you reach the root cause of a problem.
Personas
Research-based characters that represent groups of users and their goals.
Journey map
A map of a person's path through a service, with what they do, use and feel at each step.
Ecosystem map
Drawing all the actors in a service and what they exchange, to see the whole system.
Card sorting
Asking people to group cards to understand how they organize information.
User stories
Describing each feature as a short need: who, what they want and why.
Business Model Canvas
A sheet with nine blocks to see, on one page, how a project creates value and sustains itself.
Empathy map
A sheet that sorts what a person says, does, thinks and feels, so the team understands them together.
Causal loop diagram
A map of arrows that shows how some things push others until they form circles.
User story mapping
Laying out what the person will do from left to right, with what is needed below, to plan each release.
Causal layered analysis (CLA)
Looking at a problem in four layers, from what the news says to the myths that sustain it.
Kano model
Classifies a product's features by how they change the satisfaction of the people who use it.
Three horizons
A framework for talking about change with three curves: what works today, what's coming and the transition.
Mood board
A board of images, colors and textures that sets the tone of a project before designing it.
Ideate and test
To generate ideas and check whether they work.
How might we…?
Turning an insight or a problem into an open question that invites ideas.
Brainstorming
Generating many ideas as a group without judging them until the end.
Prototyping
Building quick, incomplete versions of an idea to test it before developing it.
Brainwriting (6-3-5 method)
Writing ideas in silence and passing the sheet on so someone else can build on them.
Usability testing
Watching real people attempt tasks with the product to find out where they get stuck.
Scenario planning
Imagining several plausible futures to make decisions that hold up in all of them.
SCAMPER
Seven questions for turning something that already exists into new ideas.
Crazy 8s
Sketching eight variations of an idea in eight minutes.
The Thing From The Future
A card game for imagining objects from possible futures and talking about them.
Mind map
Opening up a central topic into branches of related ideas.
Sketching
Drawing ideas quickly and cheaply to think them through and share them.
Storyboard
Telling in panels how someone uses a product or a service.
Bodystorming
Ideating in the real place, acting out with your body how the idea would be used.
Charrette
An intensive multi-day workshop where design teams and affected people propose and review together.
Role playing
Acting out a future situation with simple objects to come up with and test a product or service.
Dot voting
Each person spreads a few dots among the ideas, and the most voted ones move forward.
Design by analogy
Look at how a similar problem is solved in another field and transfer the idea.
MoSCoW method
Sorting what you want to do into must, should, could and “not this time”.
Value Proposition Canvas
Checking whether what you offer responds to what a type of customer is trying to do, suffers and wants.
Six Thinking Hats
Reviewing an idea as a group, everyone from the same angle at once, switching angles in stages.
Four Actions Framework
Rethinking an offering by asking what to eliminate, reduce, raise and create.
Desktop walkthrough
Rehearsing a service or a space with a small model and figures that walk through each step.
Wizard of Oz
Testing a system that doesn't exist yet, with a hidden person acting as the machine.
Backcasting
Imagining the future you want and walking back to today to see which steps lead there.
A/B testing
Showing two versions to random groups and measuring which one works better.
Experience prototyping
Living firsthand what it would be like to use something, with a simple setup, before building it.
Premortem
Imagining the project has already failed, to find in time what could go wrong.
System Usability Scale (SUS)
A ten-statement questionnaire that gives a 0 to 100 score for how easy something is to use.
Design speed dating
Showing many ideas as storyboards, one after another, to see which ones meet a real need.
Morphological analysis
Breaking a problem into parts, listing options for each and combining them to find ideas.
Tree testing
Checks whether people can find things in a site's menu, using only the names and no design.
Synectics
Using metaphors and analogies to see a familiar problem as if it were strange.
Accessibility audit
Reviewing a site or app against accessibility guidelines to find what excludes someone.
Cognitive walkthrough
Walking through a task step by step as a newcomer would, to see where they'd get lost.
LEGO® Serious Play®
Building models with LEGO bricks to think through a question as a group and tell what they mean.
Artifacts
What is produced and shared: maps, diagrams, systems.
Service blueprint
A map of the service that shows both what the person experiences and what makes it possible.
Design principles
A few rules, born from research, that guide every decision in a project.
Design system
The set of shared components, rules, and criteria a team uses to build its interfaces.
Wireframe
The outline of a screen in boxes and lines, without final colors or images.
User flow
The step-by-step path a person follows to complete a task in a product.
Mockup
How a screen will look, with real colors, type, images and text, but without interaction.
Opportunity solution tree
A tree-shaped map that links the outcome you want with people’s needs, ideas and tests.