Human-centred design: 5 resolutions for 2024 🌝👆

Start the year with some good habits to build great customer experiences

Jan 18, 2024

Welcome to The Navigator 🧭 - a newsletter about people, technology and design for business leaders who want to make meaningful change. I’m Sarah Ronald, and I write this newsletter with the Nile team. If this email was forwarded to you, you can subscribe here to receive it straight to your inbox.

Hello from a slightly chilly Circus Lane! ❄️

Is it too late to wish you a Happy New Year?

Probably, so instead we’re kicking off 2024 with five resolutions that will help you make better, more strategic, more human-centred design decisions this year.

Wishing you all the best as you navigate your week,
–

Sarah Ronald

Resolve to do these 5 things

There’s no sign of the cost of living decreasing, so people are making more deliberate choices when it comes to the products and services they use.

Businesses are conscious of their spending too, and most organisations want to find ways to reduce their costs and make processes more efficient.

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. With human-centred design, you can balance creating experiences that enrich customers’ lives with meeting those hard-nosed business objectives.

Here’s five resolutions you can make this year to move in the right direction.

A man, standing, points to a design exercise as two people, sitting, look on

1. Put people at the heart of design

Just as the name suggests, human-centred design is focused on people – so it's only fair that they get an invite to the design process right from the word go. That way, when it comes to content, features, and functionality, you’ll be ensuring your product or service is actually built around real needs.

Empathy lies at the heart of human-centred design. Talk to the people you’re designing for, research and understand their needs and goals, their motivations and expectations, and any hurdles in their way.

At the end of the process, the product or service you build will be more rounded and solve real world problems, so it won’t just be more usable, but more meaningful to the people using it too.

In turn, this makes it more resilient in the marketplace – and, by properly understanding customer needs, you’ll also be able to discover efficiencies and digitise existing processes, reducing the total cost of operation.

2. Address accessibility and inclusion

When you’re designing for people, make it a case of the more, the merrier. In 2023, Nile acquired inclusion and accessibility experts Dig Inclusion, whose mantra is more relevant than ever: “Things work better when they work for everyone”. In 2024, products and services should be accessible and inclusive to as many people as possible, with your design process informed by a range of abilities and backgrounds.

That doesn’t always mean making one thing to rule them all. It can make sense to build one service that meets the needs of the majority, and additional journeys – perhaps with more touchpoints and less automation – adapted to the needs of other groups.

But it does mean thinking about accessibility and inclusion from the start. The European Commission has stated that ‘afterthought’ technologies like accessibility overlays are not an appropriate response to the accessibility challenge.

With increasing regulation like the FCA Consumer Duty and the upcoming EU Accessibility Act, learning to build services with inclusion in mind is not just the right thing to do, it’s increasingly a requirement.

Watch Dig Inclusion’s webinar on the recently updated web content accessibility guidance in WCAG 2.2.

A young man in a blue t-shirt presenting his ideas

3. Share your work

If you’re working on transformative projects, share your work wider than just your immediate team.

Getting your work in front of the wider organisation builds understanding and recognition of what you’re doing, and you could gain insight from other parts of the business that adds value. You might even save yourself or others from reinventing the wheel.

When you’re working on a service or product that will have an impact, it’s also important to engage and collaborate with business functions like legal and compliance.

Getting their input can help highlight and address challenges early on, and will also help get these critical teams on-side when you’re delivering transformative, changemaking projects.

4. Don’t forget the bigger picture

Human-centred design is all about problem-solving and achieving changes in customer behaviour. While these outcomes are a yardstick of success and value, you also need to align your thinking with your organisation's business objectives.

Building a solution that’s viable and sustainable in the long run means striking a balance between what delivers for your customers and what matters to your business.

Equally, make sure the research you do with people feeds back into the business. Human-centred design can be a really powerful way to understand evolving customer behaviours and preferences, especially in times of change. Sharing what you’ve learned with the wider organisation will help other teams focus on what matters most, and inform the wider strategy for what comes next.

A young woman presents to a group of people at the Nile offices

5. Get out more

Sometimes a change of perspective can reinvigorate your work. So why not attend more events, see what others are doing, and learn something new?

Nile, Dig Inclusion and our partners run in-person events and webinars throughout the year. Last year these included No Harm Done?, our breakthrough series on design, ethics and AI in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh; our sessions on the Future of Inclusivity, and our collaboration during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with Adam Smith’s Panmure House and Bloomberg’s Merryn Talks Money podcast.

We’ve got lots more planned for this year, which we’ll share here in The Navigator. And if you’re not already following us on LinkedIn, that’s another great way to find out what’s happening.

So, as we look forward to the next 12 months, let's ask ourselves: How can we put people’s needs at the heart of our services, without losing sight of the business drivers?

Here’s to making 2024 a year of strategic, transformative, human-centred design.

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We’ll be hosting the next Edinburgh UX Meetup at Nile’s offices on 29 February. If you’re within striking distance, join the group on Meetup to make sure you don’t miss it.

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About Nile

Nile is a Strategic Design team that helps deliver human-centred change in highly regulated industries. Our methods engage employees and customers with new technology and ways of working. Our outcomes help you save money and improve your business performance.

If you think we can help your teams, reply directly to this email (they come straight to my inbox), or reach out to someone specific via our website.

Thanks for reading! 🚀