We have had user-centered design; and we’ve had human-centred design … why do we need yet another new term – people-centred design?
Because, whereas we used to think we were designing a product or an interface for a user, we now think of experience design. As a consequence we have to recognise that products affect the experiences of many more people than just the user.
A simple starting point is the distinction between customer experience and user experience, which can be very different from each other. But there are also installer experiencess, customer support experiences, family and friends’ experiences, to name just a few.
Some people might like to distinguish users from stakeholders, but you cannot design an experience for a generic stakeholder – it is essential to understand what their relationship to the product is.
Human-Centered Design is a nice term, but it generally carries the connotation of designing for all humankind, especially in relation to sustainability. The term ‘human’ tends to connote the entirety of all people generically, whereas I think ‘people’ connotes the entirety of all individuals specifically.
One of the best examples of these problems comes in the area of digital services – especially digital money – where a user-centred approach addresses those who choose to use digital money. A human-centred approach might arguably consider a broader approach of the impact of digital money on society as a whole, perhaps addressing the fact that it, in effect privatises money transactions and makes all financial transactions the property of some commercial entity.
A people-centred approach, I would argue, would identify the different kinds of people to be designed for – including those who depend upon physical cash (those without mobile phones, or without bank accounts), or those who do not wish to partake in a tracked economic environment. A people-centred approach does not address all the different groups equally, but it should lead the teams to be explicit about who they are and are not considering in their design process.
The DigiIN project in Finland is a good example of this approach examining the impact of the shift to digital services on various different groups of people that might otherwise be overlooked.
