CIOs find big benefits in shift to human-centered design
As a service organization, Save the Children wants to know the impact of its programs.
And the information it needs to gather to make that judgment differs from data typically collected by reporting software, says Sarah Angel-Johnson, the UK-based NGO’s CIO and vice president of business and technology solutions.
Using traditional measures, around project outputs, was serving neither the workers nor the children they aid as well as the organization wanted. So Angel-Johnson and her IT team have been reframing their thinking, drawing on the principles of human-centered design. They’re creating personas, including one representing children, and considering scenarios from their perspectives, asking, “What do they need?”
“It has revolutionized how we approach technology and data,” Angel-Johnson says.
Angel-Johnson, herself a practitioner of human-centered design, says she started cultivating the discipline within her technology team soon after joining the nonprofit in 2020, believing that conventional IT has often missed the mark in what it delivers.
“My view of tech is it’s a ‘how’ and we’re often missing the ‘who,’” she says. “Everyone wants to adopt tech without asking, ‘Who will use it?’”
She compares that approach to making a car engine first, without considering what the driver actually needs from the engine. “In most organizations that I’ve seen, we start with tech and it’s the wrong place to start. We need to flip it,” she adds.
Angel-Johnson describes human-centered design as “a mindset that puts people at the heart of any work; it’s around empathizing with people.”
But she and others note that human-centered design is also a discipline that brings specific skills and techniques to the process of building a product or service.
Technology teams build better, more robust products and services when they have a true understanding of individuals, their needs, and their journeys, Angel-Johnson says.
“I find my results are more robust. They’re closer to what’s actually needed, and I have higher returns,” she says, adding that leveraging human-centered design principles also helps technology teams deliver faster and at lower costs — mostly because they’re hitting closer to the mark on their first delivery.
This focus on the individual — the human element — happens not by chance but by intention.
Angel-Johnson established a human-centered design approach as part of her overall transformational agenda and her digital and data global strategy. She created teams that included practitioners of human-centered design (new hires as well as upskilled employees) who are “empathizing with the users” and working with product managers and software professionals using agile development principles to turn ideas into reality.
Case in point: A team recently created a child-centered tool, which sits on Salesforce, that gathers and consolidates data to illustrate whether all the projects supporting an individual child helps meet his or her needs — something that informs Save the Children not just on a project output but on overall outcome and impact.
Although specific figures are hard to come by, analysts, researchers, and CIOs say there’s a growing interest in and adoption of human-centered design. And with good reason, as adding this discipline to technology shops creates more useful and useable products and services, they say.
To those unfamiliar with the practice, human-centered design may seem similar to user interface design or more broadly to user experience concepts. But human-centered design goes further by putting the human at the core of the entire process, not just the interface or the experience.
That’s a change from traditional IT thinking, which historically starts with the technology, says Lane Severson, a senior director at research firm Gartner. “The prominent form in IT is machine-driven or tech-centric,” he explains.
