HUMAN-CENTERED PRODUCT PLANNING AND DESIGN:DESIGN OBJECTIVES

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DESIGN OBJECTIVES

There are three primary objectives within human-centered design. These objectives should drive much of the designers’ thinking, particularly in the earlier stages of design. Discussions in later sections illustrate the substantial impact of focusing on these three objectives.

The first objective of human-centered design is that it should enhance human abilities. This dictates that humans’ abilities in the roles of interest be identified, understood, and cultivated. For example, people tend to have excellent pattern-recognition abilities. Design should take advantage of these abilities—for instance, by using displays of information that enable users to respond on a pattern-recognition basis rather than requiring more analytical evaluation of the information.

The second objective is that human-centered design should help overcome human limitations. This requires that limitations be identified and appropriate compensatory mechanisms be devised. A good illustration of a human limitation is the proclivity to make errors. Humans are fairly flexible information processors, but this flexibility can lead to ‘‘innovations’’ that are erroneous in the sense that undesirable consequences are likely to occur.

One way of dealing with this problem is to eliminate innovations, perhaps via interlocks and rigid procedures. However, this is akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Instead, mechanisms are needed to compensate for undesirable consequences without precluding innovations. Such mech- anisms represent a human-centered approach to overcoming the human limitation of occasional er- roneous performance.

The third objective of human-centered design is that it should foster human acceptance. This dictates that stakeholders’ preferences and concerns be explicitly considered in the design process. While users are certainly key stakeholders, there are other people who are also central to the process of designing, developing, and operating a system. For example, purchasers or customers are important stakeholders who often are not users. The interests of these stakeholders also have to be considered to foster acceptance by all the people involved.

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