Best Practices for Human-Centered Design

At Runroom, we are committed to a human centric approach. For this reason, our designers also train as researchers, to have a comprehensive view of user and customer experience in projects and to define and design solutions centered on people and their real needs, ambitions, and frustrations.

As a designer, although I have great respect for good functional aesthetics, I have always been more drawn to adding value to users, whether through the stories told, the solutions offered, or simply knowing that a good digital experience is improving their daily lives.

A beautiful design is a first impression, but a good experience is a lasting memory. That’s why, aside from creating visual and functional solutions, as designers we can (and should) go further and offer this experience.

Due to my recent focus on Experience Research, I have felt the need to incorporate more user centric practices when designing, to add that layer of memorable experience to projects. That’s why I want to share some techniques I have learned along the way that might inspire you to rethink your upcoming projects.

Happy Path

The Happy Path consists of the “perfect scenario” in which the user goes through all the necessary actions to successfully complete a task. In this scenario, everything flows, nothing unusual happens, and the user directly and quickly achieves their desired goal.

This technique is ideal for starting a project, which is when we most need a little push to get started and put everything in order. By sketching the entire journey or path considering all the necessary steps to complete a task, it helps us create an initial foundation for the navigation flow and the necessary interactions we must create to make the journey make sense. It is even more interesting when we have prior Experience Research work before the digital project and have identified user archetypes and their characteristics, as this also allows us to do empathy work when creating the task journey.

Storyframing

The technique works especially well for homepages, or for example in one scroll pages whose purpose is to tell a unified and coherent story. If we think about it, designers are storytellers and digital interfaces are the stories we tell.

How to do storyframing?

1. To perform this technique, the big question we must ask ourselves is: How would I explain to a friend, in a conversation or in an email, this thing/product/story I am trying to communicate?
2. Then, we start writing on a blank sheet, what we could call a “letter to the client” answering the question from step 1. A few lines of text can help you define the narrative of the interface before you start designing in your preferred design tool (in my case, Figma).
3. When you have your first draft, try writing several versions of it. Perhaps now considering different types of users the message is directed to, rearranging elements, introducing or removing parts of the narrative, etc. Which of these versions sounds more natural to tell?
4. Share “the letter” with other people to gather feedback, remembering that this is a content exercise for a page structure, not a final copywriting job. After all, it doesn’t matter how the page is structured in detail, because the story of the page in general remains intact, as from the beginning we have focused on telling a story to our end user.

Storyframing of Runroom x Flutox

Storytelling of Dropbox

As you will see, the valuable (and practical) aspect of applying these techniques before getting hands-on is that it allows you to focus from the start on the person for whom you are designing your solution, and at the same time gives us a simple way to obtain feedback in the initial phase without yet having to invest time in building a design. I hope these solutions are useful for giving your projects a customer centric focus.

User Flow / Task Flow

A User Flow shows us the complete picture. It is a flowchart that shows us how different users can perform all the tasks our design allows. It helps us determine how different users perform tasks, find the most used flows, and identify friction points.

A Task Flow is a type of User Flow that helps us visualize the entire journey a user must take to complete a specific task. Unlike the Happy Path, here we go deeper, taking into account all possibilities and error scenarios that could occur in the flow of this specific task.