Effective, delightful customer experience solutions are within reach.
What is the HCD Production Guide?
The Production Guide demystifies what UX designers, content designers, and development teams do, using non-technical language in a generalized process that applies to both digital and non-digital work.
This generalized knowledge means the Production Guide gives you, your Project Managers, and you teams the frameworks to follow (and evaluate) the production process from research translation through iteration and a market-ready solution.
It allows you to have informed conversations with UX, product, and service design teams and the vocabulary to translate your insights on the work into language that your talent will understand.
How is the Human centered Production Guide better?
The HCD Production Guide walks you through creating great, customer-centered products, services, programs, and systems, whether you have design talent on staff, as contractors, or not at all.
From translating research findings into user-centered requirements to building solutions that you can test with real people, the HCD Production Guide treats production as craft that can be learned and directed, not magic that requires an MFA.
Why is the HCD Production Guide crucial to my success?
The Production Guide gives you a repeatable, replicable path to customer-centric solutions that you can teach to others and defend to skeptics.
You're already building solutions because your organization needs them, but without a systematic approach to production, you:
- Reinvent the wheel with every project
- Struggle to your process when leadership asks "how did you know to build it that way?"
Get the Production Guide, and move both of those rocks.
How is the HCD Production Guide organized?
The HCD Production Guide is written and organized in modular, interchangeable sections.
That means you don’t need to read straight through or follow this Guide step-by-step, like a recipe. Instead, use the parts of the Guide you need, while applying your own experience and SOPs to sail through the parts that are familiar to you.
HCD Production is systematic design & development.
The HCD Production Guide provides comprehensive customer experience production methodology for practitioners building research-driven solutions.
This systematic framework guides researchers, designers, and product managers from insights to implementation. It has been used by federal agencies including the CDC and VA, as well as in private sector organizations building products, services, and systems that are effective, workable, and sustainable.
Why both "human-centered" and "human centered"?
Good eye! "Human-centered" is grammatically correct—the hyphen creates a compound adjective that modifies "design." We use it in all our formal content and teaching materials. However, search data shows that people most often search for "human centered" (no hyphen) when looking for methodology guidance.
Since our goal is to make this research-backed framework accessible to the people who need it, we've optimized key pages for both spellings. You'll see the hyphenated version in our actual content and the non-hyphenated version in select page titles and metadata.
HCD Delivery Guide
Understand more than just launch: get the change management, continuous delivery, and sustainment guidance you need.