edX
edXData Gathering for Human-Centered Design
43 studentsINTERMEDIATEEnglish
Korshub's take
The gap between what designers build and what users actually need starts with incomplete understanding. This course teaches you how to gather rich data about the people you're designing for—not just what they say they want, but what they actually need.
You'll learn the difference between utility (does it do the job?), usability (can they figure it out?), and experience (does it feel right?) and why each demands different observation techniques. The curriculum emphasizes methodological diversity: interviews alone miss context, analytics alone miss intention, and only triangulating multiple methods reveals the full picture.
Designed for IT professionals, product designers, and anyone building systems for real clients. A practical foundation for human-centered design starting with genuine understanding.
About this course
Small tech startups, large corporations, and even government organizations are all beginning to recognize that creating solutions for their clients must go beyond simply producing functional and useable products/services. To best support their populations, designing tech solutions to problems must be more than functional. They must be more than usable. Solutions must be designed to maximize the totality of the experience that a person has with the designed solution.
Achieving this goal must begin with a rich understanding of who we are designing for. The better, more complete and holistic understanding of our users as well as anyone that can be directly or indirectly affected by what we design, the more likely we can match the solution with the mental model of our users/stakeholders.
In this course you will learn concepts, tools, and techniques, needed to gather data to better understand who you are designing for so that you can develop information system solutions that will maximize the experiences that users/stakeholders have with those solutions, enabling you to work in a myriad of real-world roles that require designing IT solutions for clients. You will learn concepts like the utility, usability and user experience, why it is important to understand who a system is designed for, and why it is important to deploy a diversity of techniques to truly get as complete a picture of your users and stakeholders as possible.
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