As experts in Human Centered Design, we’ll be your guide through the innovation process
What is Human Centered Design?
It usually begins with a challenge, or maybe an opportunity. Maybe you need to solve a problem, create a new program, or engage one of your stakeholder groups better. Maybe you are coming up on a strategic planning opportunity, and want to do it differently this time. Maybe your organization is stuck. Or maybe you have a creative idea to share with the world, and just aren’t sure if it has legs. In all of these situations, Human Centered Design can help.
Human Centered Design, sometimes called Design Thinking, is an innovation methodology—both a way of thinking and a process to be applied—that can ensure you are surfacing and centering the right people’s insights and opinions as you develop and test new ideas.
The BOOSH Process
The BOOSH Process
“When BOOSH introduced me to design thinking tools, the process completely changed the way I led my organization. I flipped from centering on what my staff and I thought we knew, and now we create based on what those using our services clearly want.” -Nonprofit CEO
FAQs
Why is Design Thinking the right framework for impact organizations and nonprofits?
The values inherent in Human Centered Design are often the same as those espoused by many nonprofit organizations. Examples might include: empathy, limiting bias, inclusion, creativity, quality, and valuing feedback. This, plus the emphasis on impact and continuous improvement, make human centered design a really aligned methodology for the social sector.
Why is the “Immerse” phase required?
Because empathy for users and reframing problems through their lens is essential to the human centered design philosophy, we really can’t conduct ideation or iteration without it. In fact, skipping this step is what we think so many other innovators get wrong. Even if the ideas or tests don’t pan out, you can always come back to the insights gained from the immerse phase to try again. It is essential and emblematic of the human centered design approach.
How is this different from typical approaches to problem-solving or strategic planning?
In traditional innovation approaches, a group of organizational leaders ideate about what might need to occur to make things better. These brainstorming sessions are usually based on a really well-intentioned, but often invisible force: bias. Human Centered Design aims to sideline the preferences of those doing the design in favor of surfacing insights from the target audience. We use these insights to reframe the design itself. Using empathy, this process holds designers accountable to their constituents. The results are ideas and innovations that are rooted in users’ reality, and therefore have a greater chance of successful and positive impact.
What will I get after working with you?
After Immersion, you’ll have a clear sense of the key themes and insights articulated by your users. We’ll turn these insights into opportunities (we call them How Might We questions), that can inform policy, messaging, programs and services, even strategy. They will also serve as your guide for the next phase of the process, Ideation.
After Ideation, you’ll have a list of curated conceptual ideas that are ready for prototyping and feedback. As a bonus, you may also have a group of engaged and passionate colleagues who have helped you brainstorm around the How Might We questions, and are ready to advocate for, build, and learn from early-stage testing.
After Iteration, you’ll have real-time feedback from your users about the concept(s) you’ve brought to life, along with a list of recommendations for how to improve or alter the ideas for maximum impact and scale.