Human-centered Design vs. User-centered Design

Human-centered design is the process that considers human characteristics, perception and psychology and creates the project based on those findings. This means human characteristics as a whole; it doesn’t specifically target any one demographic, but considers the general thoughts of all humans.

This sort of design is much more general. The creation is based off of the broad-spectrum of human characteristics and the ways they understand their environment.

Benefits of a human-centered design

Human-centered design allows your website to be created for a very wide range of visitors. It doesn’t target any one demographic or shopper. Instead, it targets the human experience as a whole by considering the ways that humans generally react to any given element of your website.

As a very basic example, consider the way the color yellow makes you feel. Studies suggest yellow is a color that reflects happiness and optimism. Furthermore, the color yellow isn’t targeting any specific demographic, rather it is targeting the human experience and reaction to the color yellow as a whole. Choosing the color yellow for your website would be an example of human-centered design.

Drawbacks of a human-centered design

Though all websites should be created to consider the human experience as a whole (that’s just general best-practice), you shouldn’t only consider human-centered design.

If you want to drive the most possible traffic to your site, you should always have a target audience. By utilizing a human-centered design, you neglect to appeal to a target audience, but rather you cater to all audiences.

This isn’t a bad thing, but if you really want your company to be successful, you should have a target demographic and design your website around their interests.

When should I use a human-centered design?

Using a human centered design is great for companies that target every demographic. This would include cereal box designs, department stores, fast food restaurants—places that sell products that aren’t demographic-specific.

There are many web developers that consider these two terms to be interchangeable, and there is some truth to that. However, the two terms are important indicators of how detailed your site is.

Because of this, the two terms might have similar meanings, but should be distinguished in order to produce a website that is either targeting a wide-spread demographic or a tighter target.

Without knowing these details, your website may fall behind, simply because it isn’t doing its job in targeting the audience that would buy the most of a certain product.