Human-centered design (HCD) is all about putting the user first, and as product managers, it’s a principle that can make a transformative difference in our work. After taking a course in HCD with the LUMA Institute, I found that their approach provided actionable tools to better understand users and design products that truly resonate, it really became a way to understand how we assemble information to design. Here, I’ll walk through key HCD methods from LUMA that I’ve found valuable in product management and share practical examples of how they can be applied to the product development lifecycle.
HCD is broke down in 4 Methods:
Looking: Observing Human Experiences - It begins and ends with people and requires keen observations, curiosity, objectivity and empathy for meaningful findings.
Understanding: Analyzing Challenges and Opportunities - It is the practice of thoughful analysis, critical thinking and problem framing.
Making: Envisioning Future Possibilities - It involves imaginative, visual expression, thinking with your hands to bring new ideas to life.
1. Looking - User Interviews: Listening to Understand, Not to Reply
Some key excercises here are interviewing, fly on the wall, walk a mile immersion. A walking backwards approach. Ethnographic research, or participatory research, or evaluative research like critiques, heuristic reviews or usability scales.
The user interview is a staple of HCD and one of the first steps in building empathy for your end-users. The aim is to dig deep into their needs, frustrations, and motivations. The LUMA Institute’s approach emphasizes structuring interviews to encourage open-ended conversation, allowing you to uncover insights you might not get through quantitative data alone.
Practical Example:
During a project to redesign an onboarding process, we conducted interviews with new users who struggled with initial setup. Rather than asking directly about specific features, we asked broader questions about their first-time experiences with the product. This revealed that many were overwhelmed by unnecessary setup options, leading us to simplify the process.
Takeaway: Structure interviews to focus on users’ experiences and motivations. Avoid jumping straight to feature requests; instead, seek to understand the underlying needs.
2. Understanding - Journey Mapping: Seeing the Product Through the User’s Eyes
Understanding is broken down in 3 core methods of people and systems, so stake holder mapping, persona profiles, experience diagrams.
Patterns and priorities, is the act of finding patters and determing prioritization, such as affinity clustering, importance/difficulty matrix.
In the case of journey mapping it is a method that visualizes the entire experience from the user’s perspective. It’s particularly useful in identifying friction points in your product. Mapping out every interaction, from first encounter to exit, and assigning emotions to each stage. Product like Heap Analytics, help understanding how fragmented various journeys can be created and we need to understand them.
Practical Example:
For a financial product, we created a journey map detailing how users interacted with the app—from setting up their accounts to managing transactions. This revealed that users felt a “dip” in satisfaction at the payment stage due to hidden fees. We used this insight to redesign the payment flow, making fees more transparent and improving trust in the process.
Takeaway: Journey mapping isn’t just about tracking steps—it’s about understanding the emotions and frustrations users experience along the way. Use this to identify and prioritize improvements that create a more seamless journey.
3. Understanding - Persona Development: Focusing on Real People, Not Demographics
Personas go beyond demographics; they capture user motivations, goals, and pain points in a relatable, human-centered way. HCD framework encourages building personas that represent real user needs, allowing product teams to design with empathy.
Practical Example:
At Amway, we developed personas not just based on their user types but on actual motivations. For example, creating “Efficient Emma,” an office manager driven by productivity, and “Curious Carl,” a senior focused on exploring new features. It has to go deeper into their pain points, distinguishing characteristics, their needs and goals. These personas guided our roadmap, helping us prioritize tools that enhanced productivity and simplified reporting. This is something we did a lot of at Amway.
Takeaway: Well-crafted personas keep the team focused on real user needs instead of generic assumptions. They act as reference points for decision-making across the development process.
4. Understanding - Affinity Diagramming: Finding Patterns in User Feedback
Affinity diagramming organizes user insights by grouping related ideas or feedback. It allows us to group by similarity.
This method is powerful in making sense of large sets of qualitative data, especially when brainstorming or analyzing user feedback.
Practical Example:
After running multiple usability tests, we had a mountain of feedback that felt scattered and overwhelming. By using affinity diagramming, we grouped feedback into themes like “ease of use,” “design clarity,” and “feature accessibility.” This allowed us to see that most issues revolved around navigational challenges, which became a high-priority area for improvement.
Takeaway: Affinity diagramming is especially useful when you’re overloaded with user data. By clustering insights, you can find patterns and themes that inform your product priorities more clearly.
5. Making - Idea Generation: Encouraging Divergent Thinking
In the making phases, it's broken down into 3 categories, concept ideation, modeling and prototyping, and design rationale. Each of these categories have specific techniques we use to bring ideas to life.
Emphasis on idea generation encourages “divergent thinking”—a way of brainstorming that helps teams explore a wide range of possibilities without judgment. This is particularly valuable in the early stages of product planning when exploring potential solutions to user problems.
Practical Example:
While brainstorming improvements for an app feature, our team practiced divergent thinking by setting a timer for 10 minutes and listing as many ideas as possible. We didn’t worry about feasibility at this stage—our only goal was to generate ideas. Afterward, we filtered them down, and a few wild ideas turned into innovative solutions.
Takeaway: Give yourself permission to explore ideas without immediately worrying about limitations. This openness often leads to creative solutions that wouldn’t surface in a traditional brainstorming session. This is the fun part that I like and that is making things.
6. Making - Rapid Prototyping and Feedback: Testing Quickly to Learn Faster
HCD places strong emphasis on getting user feedback early and often. Rapid prototyping enables product teams to create low-fidelity mockups, test them, and gather insights quickly. It's not about building polished versions; it’s about creating something fast and functional enough to test the concept. This is the step where we bring agile into the fold.
Practical Example:
In one project I recall, we created paper prototypes for a new feature, invited a few users to test them, and gathered feedback within hours. This was merely cutting pieces of paper and placing on a white board in a mock design and interviewing test users if made sense. This quick validation helped us refine the concept without spending weeks on development, saving both time and resources.
Takeaway: Rapid prototyping helps you learn faster and refine ideas based on user feedback. Don’t aim for perfection in early stages; instead, aim to test, learn, and adapt.
Bringing It All Together
Incorporating HCD principles into product management isn’t just a checklist—it’s a mindset. I've seen it all too often where teams assume way to much about their users, appeal to their stake holders and miss the most important aspects of human design. When creating software it always boils down to ability. By prioritizing user-centered methods, you stay grounded in the real needs and experiences of the people you’re designing for.
Using user interviews, journey mapping, personas, and prototyping, you can build products that aren’t just functional but also resonate with users on a deeper level. At the end of the day, our role as product managers is to advocate for the user, and HCD methods provide the blueprint to make that advocacy effective.
Human-centered design is an ongoing commitment. The more you practice these methods, the more you’ll see your product evolve in ways that meet business goals and, most importantly, make a meaningful impact on users’ lives.
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