What Is Human-Centered Design?
When your school wants to drive improvement, looking for novel planning and implementation processes can help you find a system that will work for your community. Human-centered design can help align your school’s interests with those you are trying to help — your students and teachers.
Understanding Human-Centered Design
Human-centered design is product, service and system development that asks designers to consider the audience’s perspective when making new products. The goal is to better identify and solve user pain points to create a more effective product, service or system that will suit human needs and applications.
Human-centered design rests on several vital pillars that teams must consider when designing and implementing new products. Administrators can also implement these steps to help create a more human-centered school.
- Empathy: The first step in developing a human-centered design is recognizing a current problem. This recognition and compassion can help you better connect with your students and teachers to work toward a solution.
- Identify: After practicing empathy, your administrators can start surveying students and teachers. Through questionnaires or interviews, ask about their experiences and concerns, or discover them naturally through classroom observations.
- Ideate: After identifying the problem at your school, you can brainstorm ideas. However, you must keep your teachers’ and students’ needs in mind as you work. When industry standards and designs are already not working for them, you can’t introduce a different version of those products. They need something tailored to their specific issues.
- Prototype and test: Brainstorming multiple solutions is optimal. Having several options shows your audience you care about their needs and are willing to return to the previous stage to find them. Prototypes and testing can identify new problems in the system or eliminate potential solutions while providing more opportunities for teachers and students to voice their thoughts.
- Implement: When you discover an ideal solution, you can implement it. This stage might include equipping students or teachers with new technology or tools or adding new classroom features.
When organizations put their audience at the center of the design, they can create products that boost user satisfaction and foster deeper relationships with audience members.
The Importance of Human-Centered Designs in the Classroom
Human-centered designs benefit all industries, including education, because they aim to solve a direct problem for the customer. Products, services and systems implemented through these strategies can change industry standards and draw in new customers and markets for businesses.
In education, human-centered designs can optimize the learning environment by eliminating distractions or providing teachers and students with better tools. Without problems blocking the workflow or learning, students can better integrate essential knowledge and strategies to continue their education.
How to Create Human-Centered Technology Designs
While technology can significantly benefit and enhance learning and teaching for your school, implementation often comes with a learning curve or additional problems that you can use human-centered designs to solve.
At PowerGistics, we develop device storage and charging units for classrooms to organize laptops and tablets and optimize their impact on students. Horizontal shelf design streamlines the retrieval and cleanup processes for teachers and students, solving issues associated with storing devices in the classroom. With our product, you can implement a human-centered design that supports your students and teachers as they use technology in the classroom.
1. Improve Cable Placement
Cables are a significant pain point for schools using traditional laptop carts or other storage solutions. So many devices stored and charging in one place require countless wires that get tangled easily. Students might get confused about which charger belongs to their laptop and plug it into the wrong place, preventing it from charging properly.
This scenario can create additional problems, where students can’t learn or participate because they must wait for devices to charge. If a student accidentally switches a cable with someone else, it will affect two people. Plus, when cords get too tangled, someone must spend time straightening everything out.
Instead, PowerGistics’ solutions keep wires within their slots, preventing students from mixing up chargers. The cords only come out a couple of inches to allow for some movement. You can also view the charging status from the outside to determine which devices are ready for use.
2. Enable Safer Device Handling
Whether you have young elementary students or high schoolers preparing for adulthood, accidents happen. Your current solution might make it hard for students to grab their devices and safely return from the cart. Dropped laptops or tablets can result in cracked, unusable devices with damaged hardware.
The layout and spacing of our racks enable increased accessibility to individual devices, making it easier to remove them safely. Without cords in the way, students can get both hands around the device to prevent dangerous drops that lead to expensive damages.
3. Consider Space and Accessibility
In addition to individual availability, you should consider how accessible devices are in classrooms overall. If students regularly use devices for independent work or group projects, they need to access devices easily. However, laptop carts can take up vital classroom space, making them feel cramped and hard to move around efficiently. This downside can deter teachers from keeping laptops and tablets available in classrooms, limiting student access.
PowerGistics designs our charging and storage stations to maximize space, so teachers can better optimize classrooms. With more customized solutions, we can offer portable options, so teachers can easily and safely move storage to fit their classroom needs. Students can better access devices to improve their time at school.
4. Prevent Device Theft or Loss
Disorganized laptop carts with dangling cables and misplaced devices can make it challenging for teachers to track which devices are present at the end of class. Students might accidentally or intentionally take laptops with them, whether in a rush to get to their next class or because they know the disorganization will give them time before getting caught.
Organized storage and charging solutions can streamline processes for teachers, allowing them to check quickly that all devices are present. PowerGistics’ simplified design makes it obvious when laptops are missing. Teachers can easily see how many and which ones are gone, so they can reduce missing resources for their school.
Implement a Human-Centered Classroom Design With PowerGistics
While the human-centered design process often focuses on developing new products and systems, your school can implement this design thinking by integrating new solutions for your students and teachers. When you partner with PowerGistics, you can discover solutions that will solve the daily problems your teachers and students face for better operations and increased learning. We offer comprehensive options, from different charging capacities to various device types, so you can implement options that meet your students’ needs.
Contact PowerGistics today to get started.