User-Centred Design without Involving Users: A Longitudinal Case Study in a Human-Centred-Design–Mature Company

Abstract

Human-centred design has grown into a widely applied field that has produced a large number of standards, methods and guidelines for designing meaningful and usable products and services and direct contact to users seems to define whether a project is considered human-centric or not. However, as the field has grown more mature, companies have also matured in human-centredness, and thus, they have already accumulated user knowledge and may not need to start from the beginning in each project. This paper presents a case study of a human-centred-design–mature company, where first-hand access to users was blocked due to confidentiality. The project team had to rely on other sources of user knowledge. They utilized user representations that were based on earlier user studies and other sources, and the company also employed in-house users who gave their input in the product development process. Together these resulted in a successful design project.

Keywords:

• human-centred design
• user representations
• product design
• HCD maturity
• user research
• user-centred design
• methods

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank The Finnish Science Foundation for Technology and Economics KAUTE for supporting writing this paper. In addition, I thank Sampsa Hyysalo, Andrea Botero and other INUSE research group members for commenting this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The transcriptions of the meeting are translated from Finnish to English by the author. As Finnish is significantly further from English in terms of vocabulary, grammar and idioms than any Indo-European language, the translation results are at times difficult to follow. In addition, words have been translated into their literal English form, preferring meaning over verbalization. The translations attempted to preserve the tone of spoken language.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kaisa Savolainen

Kaisa Savolainen, DA (Art and Des), MSc (Tech) is a researcher at Aalto University. Her research focuses on human-centred design, co-design and accessibility. She has also worked for over 10 years in the private sector on areas related to user research and co-design.