Human Centred Design
When we talk about design we mean human centred design or design thinking.
There are three traditional approaches to design
- designing something for yourself
- designing for someone else
- design for a group
With human centred design we are focused on type 3. The difference here's thatrecognisin designing something for ourselves might not meet everybody else's needs as all people are different and will interacting experiance things in different ways. This is due to a variety of reasons not limited to:
- different mental models
- different abilities - physical visual cognitive etc
- different goals and motivations
When designing for groups of users user research and user testing are the key methods employed to test that what you are designing meets the needs of the user base.
Sometimes in companies the user research or user testing is skipped or minimised which would cause the project or design to fall in to the first 2 types of design.
Design model
Here is a one approach from the British design council called the double diamond.
There are a number of simlar approaches such as the Stanford d.school and the ideo