The heart of successful product design is a creative problem-solving approach called Human Centered Design (HCD). Most of your internal design teams, and any reputable consultant, already know the value of HCD. This method focuses on placing the people who will be using your product or service at the heart of design to create solutions that are functional, relevant, and enjoyable to them. Human Centered Design, just like Design Thinking, has been around long enough to now be considered essential approaches for any design team’s toolbox - table stakes: already baked in.

Designing with Empathy

The most important key principle of HCD is empathy. This includes observation, active listening, and contextual research to gain the best understanding of problems. When identifying challenges to solve, researchers want to know what people are doing, thinking, and feeling and where they are experiencing problems. The emotional connection made between the researcher and the user during ethnography is the super glue that holds this approach together.

With incredible advances in AI technology, it’s this empathy portion of the process that has garnered great interest and debate as of late. Something about people’s interactions, and what we usually call soft skills or emotional intelligence, gets to the heart of being human, and powers those electric human-to-human connections that allow for authentic product offerings. Could the AI system make the same connections? Could ‘synthetic users’ providing all your input and feedback replace actual human feedback?

The Essential Skills

Call them ‘soft skills,’ but I’d rather call them Essential Human Skills because they counteract the hard and heartless skills often cherished in business. They also counter the rising reliance on the ubiquitous GenAI and its synthetic soft skills that, if relied upon too heavily, might lead to an uninspiring future of bland, soul-less products and experiences.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge proponent of GenAI, and it is an indispensable tool for what we do at Balance Innovation. However, the highest priority and most fundamental thing we can do is go into the field to observe and interact with the people who will benefit from using the products we will eventually develop. It’s only through our human-to-human interactions that we can get to the crux of what’s holding people back and design an ideal solution for their problems.

An Industry That Can Lead The Way

Children, parents, caregivers, teachers, therapists, pediatricians, daycare workers; in our toy and juvenile product industry, we have a huge number of people from whom we can learn. So do yourself a favor and speak with and observe all of them while you’re developing your new offerings. Get to know their challenges and needs. Identify the jobs they need to get done. Feel their frustrations. Understand their mindsets. There are so many places to utilize our Essential Human Skills, and no better ultimate customer for us to serve - kids.

In a post-Covid world that seems increasingly to lack civility and compassion, that includes potentially suffocating tariffs, and a ‘2 dolls & 5 pencils’ Christmas; it’s the perfect time for our industry to band together and take the lead on compassion and empathy. After all, it’s our customers - the children - who will make this world a better place in the future, and we can give them the tools to do so.

We hear the phrase ‘now, more than ever’ everywhere during these times of extreme messaging, so I’m going to use it here too. Now, more than ever, our industry needs more empathy and a focus on Essential Human Skills to move our field, and the world, forward.

Our kids are counting on it.

About The Author:
René Polin is the President & Founder of Balance Innovation, a consulting firm that identifies and develops differentiated products & services through Human Centered Transformation. He’s also the designer of hundreds of successful childrens’ products.