Why charities shouldn’t be user-centred
First, what is user-centred design?
User-centered design (UCD) is a collection of processes that focus on putting users at the center of product design and development.
Ekaterina Novoseltseva
Over the past few years, more charities have been adopting user-centred design practices when building a new website, redesigning grant making processes, and creating new products and services. It’s good progress away from creating these things based on what the organisation thinks is important or the opinions of senior people, but it isn’t without its problems.
UCD is always constrained by its purpose of meeting the needs of individuals. But by focusing on the needs of individuals charities can inadvertently reinforce the continued existence of those needs. UCD has it’s place in meeting immediate needs, but it doesn’t create long-term change. It isn’t equipped to move beyond identifying and responding to the needs of individuals and into the systems that create those needs.
System-shifting design, with its emerging practices and approaches that focus on how systems can be redesigned, offers charities a different way to think about how best to help people. SSD often works in an attempt to remove the problems that people face rather than just making it slightly easier for people to deal with the problems.
System-shifting design is very new, and I don’t know of any charities using it, but if a charity has a mission or ambition to create change then it’s likely to be a more successful design methodology than UCD.