An introduction to measurement in HCD practice

Measurement in an HCD context

The measurement phase of human-centered design (HCD) seeks to map and understand the effects of programs, products, services, and systems (we call these “interventions”) on a large problem space.

In this operations guide, you’ll learn how to plan, implement and communicate a measurement process for your HCD projects. This guide complements the ideas and approaches explored in the companion HCD measurement concepts guide, which will help you build knowledge around what it means to measure a human-centered project. We designed these two guides to speak to each other - you can start with either one and move between them as needed.

For an overview of the HCD process shown above, review the introduction to human-centered design in this guide series.

Measurement within the HCD phases

Because the word “measurement” may have different meanings depending on the context in which it’s used, we’ll spend a moment here to differentiate the meaning of “measurement” in various phases of the HCD process.

• Discovery: Use problem frames to scope down big, vague issues to a scale that the team can feasibly research and understand.
• Design: Create interventions to effectively address the issues discovered in the problem frame, and test these interventions to improve them. In this phase, people sometimes use the word “measurement” as a stand-in for “test.”
• Delivery: Deploy those interventions and gather design-level data on how they’re working for users.
• Measurement: Return to those big, vague issues that you started with, and measure how well the intervention affects change on those vague problem areas.

In the measurement phase, you learn where you need more discovery, and where your interventions do not yet reach. In this way, the data you gather in the measurement phase sends you back into the previous phases with more intelligence and a clearer path forward than you could have had before measuring at this large scale.

Why measure HCD projects?

This guide will help you build a process to measure the value and effectiveness of your HCD project, so you can better understand and improve its impact on the people and things around it.

HCD measurement operations guide sections

• Measuring multidimensional problems
• An introduction to compiled indicators
• Define the “big why”
• Establish and use compiled indicators
• Designate balanced datasets
• Gather data
• Basic data coding
• Normalization explained
• Produce an indicator score
• Appendix

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