Designing Human-Centered Solutions

The introduction to the general population of things like the PC and the World Wide Web, resulted in the democratization of IT solutions. Computing power and access to information is no longer just in the hands of experts and/or the elites. This shift in focus started to reveal some important gaps in development approaches. While traditional views of development helped create a disciplined, structured, and standardized way of making a functional system, in today’s environment we place the primary focus, not on making the system functional then making users adapt, but rather making the human functional and building the system to adjust to them.

This course, therefore, arose from a perceived need to change and adapt to a new development mindset and how we might first approach a problem by examining the user and how they might best be served. Once we a have done our best to understand as much as possible the humans we are designing the solution for, then we begin to address how we can build a system that will provide the appropriate support and functionality for those humans.

This course will introduce you to the ways and methods of developing IT solutions from a human-centered perspective. We will be introduced to the stages and processes that designers and developers must go through in order to make a system image match as closely as possible to the mental model that our users and other stakeholders have for what that system should be. With a solid empathetic understanding of who our users are, this course will introduce you to various techniques for determining, (1) do we really understand the problem from their perspective; (2) can we envision possible solutions to that problem, and (3) how close is “our” solution to “the” solution to the problem?