The importanceof human-centred
design – designing
services for realpeople

Our days are filled withpeople asking us questions
and requesting our help. Ourservice desks are cloggedwith phone calls and support
requests. And a new chat bot
is born every day to answer
the never-ending slew ofquestions.

Have you ever stopped to ask why people need somuch help to complete everyday tasks? What if, insteadof creating yet another chat bot and focussing on thesymptom, we actually solved the root problem? What if
we designed services and experiences for real people
so they could do what they needed without our help?
When you take the time to speak to your service
desk team you’ll notice they spend 80% of their timeanswering the same handful of questions. Forget
expensive market research or over-priced consulting
engagements; spend 30 minutes with your service deskand you will get great insight into what pains your users
for free. If you took these handful of pain points andre-designed the process or experience so users could
complete these tasks easily then you would save timeand money and make everyone very happy. This is theessence of human-centred design.
Human-centred design places people at the centre of
the problem. It considers the real person; what they
are trying to achieve; and how they prefer to operate.
It’s about designing services and experience which
support users to complete their daily tasks. Ef fective
human-centred design saves time and money; it frees
employees from manual repetitive tasks to work on
activities that matter. From a citizen perspective, it
helps people complete critical tasks without the needto call or walk into a service of fice.Tips for implementing ef fective human-centred design:

1.

Talk to your service desk for the most commonly
reported pain points. Review your web traf fic
reports for frequently visited pages and higher
than usual page bounce rates. Conduct surveys anddiscovery sessions to understand the issues for yourcustomers and citizens, but also your employees.

Understand your users
The key to ef fective human-centred design is tounderstand your users – the people you serve.
Building personas is an easy and ef fective way
to identify all your dif ferent user types. For agovernment agency, users may include citizens
who live locally, inter-state, or internationally. It
may include users who are digitally savvy andusers who only operate of f-line. Recognising eachof the dif ferent types of users and their dif ferent
needs helps you to predict and design the dif ferent
services they may need.

2.

Map user journeys
Once you have identified your primary personas it isimportant to map their various tasks and journeys.
User journeys generally include the individual steps
within the process, the tools and systems users
interact with, the facilitators and approvers involved,and often the pain points and barriers experienced.
Visualising an experience can be a powerful tool
to illustrate the lived experience from a user’sperspective. It can show the complexity, ef fort, andfrustrations experienced by users, and the ef fort
and frustrations of internal employees trying toadminister such complex processes. A well-designed
journey map can be a light bulb moment for manyorganisations seeking change.
And the journey and experience may look and feel
vastly dif ferent for dif ferent user groups. Consider
the simple task of registering for a new service. The
digitally savvy user may prefer to use your app; theinternational user may need to use a web-based
form; and the of fline user may need a hard copy of aform in the mail. Mapping the journey upfront helps
you design the right service and experience the firsttime, as it can cost significantly more to re-develop
or correct a journey after it has been implemented.

3.

And remember, experiences rarely happen inisolation; they are a network of touchpoints andinteractions. Users looking to complete one task
may naturally need to complete a secondary task.
For example a newly registered user may need to
update their profile and contact details, they may
need to add security questions, or link their accountwith another service. Good journey mapping will
flag these dependencies and good human-centred
design will treat them as a connected family of
streamlined experiences.

Prioritise high frequency tasks

4.

Stop thinking about yourself
Often, we are so wrapped up in the internal
structures and operations of our own organisations
that we forget who we are serving. And this carries
through into our services. We require our users
to understand and work within our organisationalstructures. We create unnatural hand-of f points in aprocess that are unnecessary, and often disruptive.
We hold information in silos and make users repeat
steps and provide the same information more thanonce. A user doesn’t care which department owns
which part of the process; they just want to get thetask done and get back to living their life.

Human-centred design is about putting people at thecentre of the problem and the centre of the solution.
It’s about creating intuitive, seamless experiencesthat help users complete their tasks quickly andeasily. It’s about making the lives of our employees
easier, removing the obstacles, manual processes,
and duplicated ef fort that stifles their productivity
and happiness. Human-centred design is a criticalingredient for ef fective business improvement andsuccessful transformation.

We are all busy and not all problems may be worth
solving. So it is important to prioritise the highfrequency or high value journeys first. Streamline
the most frequent experiences of your users.

Australia

T +61 2 9776 4555

E askus@fujitsu.com

W www.fujitsu.com/au/dx