Introduction

About this GUIDE

This guide is a FREE Open Education Resource integrated with videos, web links and tools about Human Centred Design for entrepreneurship.

It describes the methodology and provides a practical point of view with successful cases, tools and materials.

The guide is designed to be used by:

- Actual Students: to enrich and update the knowledge with a topic not usually included in academic courses - Future Students: to attract students to the Higher Education (HE) system by providing for free innovative methodologies with a gamified approach - Former Students: to update the knowledge with fresh perspectives coming from an innovative methodology to create successful enterprises - Start-uppers, business sector, accelerators and incubators and all SMEs: interested in new perspectives and approaches useful to survive and adapt the enterprises.

About Human-Centred Design

Human-Centred Design (HCD) is a design and management framework that develops solutions to problems by involving the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process. Human involvement typically takes place in observing the problem within context, brainstorming, conceptualizing, developing, and implementing the solution. Human-Centred Design is an approach to interactive systems development that aims to make systems usable and useful by focusing on the users, their needs and requirements, and by applying human factors/ergonomics, usability knowledge and techniques. This approach enhances effectiveness and efficiency, improves human well-being, user satisfaction, accessibility and sustainability; and counteracts possible adverse effects of use on human health, safety and performance.

Human-Centred Design builds upon participatory action research by moving beyond participants' involvement and producing solutions to problems rather than solely documenting them. Initial stages usually revolve around immersion, observing, and contextual framing in which innovators immerse themselves with the problem and community. Consequent stages may then focus on community brainstorming, modelling and prototyping, and implementation in community spaces. Furthermore, Human-Centred Design typically focuses on integrating technology or other useful tools in order to alleviate problems; for example, health technologies is one common area where HCD is used. Once the solution is integrated, Human-Centred Design usually employs system usability scales and community feedback in order to determine the success of the solution. System usability scale is a 10-item questionnaire tool that can be used for assessing the usability of a solution. One of its main benefits is that it can yield reliable results even with small sample sizes (Usability.gov 2021). There are also numerous other ways to collect community feedback. For instance, in online services, a Net Promoter Score is one of the easiest ways to collect feedback: it presents the user with the simple question of “How likely are you to recommend (our service) to a friend or a colleague”. Those giving a rating of under 7 (in a 10-point Likert scale) should be followed up on for further information about what they were unsatisfied with, whereas those giving 9-10 could be engaged for testimonials and referrals (Forbes 2019).

About INNOVATION

- The HCD methodology is focused on empathy that is more and more recognised as an essential element for modern managers and enterprises. As explained in IDEO’s Human-Centred Design Toolkit, empathy is a “deep understanding of the problems and realities of the people you are designing for”. It refers to getting to know about the difficulties people face, discovering their latent needs and desires in order to explain their behaviours. For this reason, understanding of the people’s environment is highly important, as well as their roles in and interactions with it. Unlike traditional marketing research which is focusing on facts about people, empathic research is more focused on motivations and thoughts. Finding out what people mean instead of what they say is also very subjective.

- The HCD is an integrated approach that is iterative, measurable and results-driven. It engages through collaboration, system mapping, participatory research but also rapid prototyping and piloted implementation.

- Enterprises are now focusing as much on their consumer experience as on the product delivered. The HCD is a unique approach as it merges between four main characteristics:

 user needs (empathy)  involvement of the consumer in the development process (collaboration)  the belief that it is possible to create a change (optimism)  based on learning by doing and prototyping (experimentality).

About the EXPECTED IMPACT AND TRANSFERABILITY POTENTIAL

The impact is expected to be large and the transferability potential should be substantial thanks to the open access of the guide (through an Open MOOC).

Another element of innovation to consider is connected to the availability of the guide in five different national languages (English, Finnish, Italian, French and Icelandic). The number of comparable guides in languages different from English is small, which adds a challenge related to the translation process, as there is a need to invent novel terminology in some languages.