I'm developing a learning solution for adults in a corporate workplace, to help them build a sense of purpose and drive motivation and engagement at work. What pushed me to pursue it was personal: I had lived the problem, and I had a specific solution in mind that once worked for me. Coaching.
As with any design process, I began by analysing the current reality and identifying my users' needs. I scheduled interviews to understand what purpose meant to them, what they thought of coaching, and so on. To my surprise, not one of them felt coaching was a practical solution. I was disappointed, because I was convinced it was the right answer.
I was trying to fit the users and their needs into a solution I had already designed.
Where human-centred design comes in
What interests me about Human-Centred Design is its deliberate focus on mindsets, not just process. Two stand out. The first is empathy. How do we understand our users and what actually matters to them? In my case, the first and hardest thing I had to do was remove myself from the equation, so I could focus on the problem instead of my solution and meet my users with empathy.
"In order to get to new solutions, you have to get to know different people, different scenarios, different places."
Learning from failure
The second mindset is learning from failure. It sounded like generic advice at first, but the deeper I went, the more it earned its weight. My problem had so many stakeholders, and every person I spoke to seemed to need something different. When I brainstormed solutions, I had a list of twenty, and not one felt like the right one. Around then, I attended a talk by the founders of Pratham, an NGO working to bridge education inequity in India. They said, "We spent five years solving the wrong problem," and it changed how I see problem-solving.
So, is there a perfect design?
Connecting it back to my work, I realised that finding one perfect solution isn't always feasible. Especially in learning design, where the very definition of learning keeps shifting, the only way to design something close to perfect is to continuously evaluate, improve, and iterate.