Intro to Human-Centered Design (Part 2)

Once you have done the empathy work — the interviews, the observations, the immersive experiences — you are sitting on a large, messy pile of insight. The challenge at this stage is not gathering more information; it is making sense of what you already have without flattening it into something safe and obvious. This is where many teams stumble, and where the define phase of human-centred design does its most important work.

In this Member Byte, Rob Netterfield covers the second phase of the HCD double diamond: identifying problems and defining opportunities. He walks through the capture-cluster-craft method for synthesising research, introduces three practical frameworks for finding clarity in complexity, addresses the biases that most commonly distort this work, and explains how to convert everything into a well-formed How Might We question ready for ideation.

For contact centre and CX leaders, this is the phase that determines whether a design project solves the right problem or just a convenient one. Getting it right requires discipline, collaboration, and a willingness to sit with ambiguity a little longer than feels comfortable.