The Human centered Design Guide Series
Why get the full Human centered Design (HCD) Guide Series?
The complete four-guide series (Discovery, Production, Delivery, Measurement) provides a systematic, evidence-based methodology for the full lifecycle of organizational problem-solving - from surfacing misalignment through sustainment and impact measurement.
Developed over 20 years in partnership with private and public sector organizations like Vogue, Universal Pictures, VA, NASA, and CDC, it's the only complete framework built for teams working at scale with realistic constraints, small "p" political complexity, and accountability to shareholders, boards, or public officials.
How is human centered design different?
Human-centered design consciously puts the human at the center of every step in the research, development, delivery, and measurement of any CX, DX, innovation, or process improvement project. Putting humans at the center helps you avoid unnecessary tech debt, organizational back-bending, and expensive investments in platforms.
Unlike Agile (focuses on production only), Design Thinking (stops at ideation), or consultant playbooks (creates dependency), human-centered design, or HCD, is a complete system developed over decades with real businesses, nonprofits, and federal agencies.
It's intellectually rigorous enough to defend (based on OECD, UNECE, the National Science Foundation, and field-tested methodologies) while remaining practical enough that your teams can execute it tomorrow without hiring specialists.
From Vogue to VA, this method has been applied, and it works. Anywhere you land, whatever resources you have, the human-centered design system gives you repeatable craft that builds your capability instead of requiring expensive experts.
Why is the HCD Guide series crucial for your work?
The full HCD Guide Series gives you one systematic approach that your whole team can learn, so you stop risking momentum loss at every transition and start building organizational muscle that compounds over time.
You've tried consultants, sent people to training, bought licenses for frameworks - and your organization still can't consistently take complex problems from discovery through sustained value creation. The HCD Guide series gives you the systematic approach that transfers capability rather than creating dependency, so three years from now your teams are more capable, not more reliant on external experts.
How is the HCD Guide Series organized?
Think of the HCD Guides like a travel series through the HCD process.
In the same way you can collect travel guides to Kyoto, Tokyo, and Nagasaki instead of a single, lengthy all-Japan travel guide, the HCD Guide series provides two volumes for each phase of the HCD process: a concept guide, focusing on why the phase works the way it does, and an operations guide with checklists and frameworks to help with the how of the phase.
The Concepts & Operations in each Guide are organized in modular, reconfigurable sections.
That means you don’t need to read straight through or follow the Guides 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.
What's inside each Guide?
Discovery Guide
The Discovery Guide provides a systematic method for surfacing meaningful customer data.
With the Discovery Guide, your teams gather evidence that focuses attention on the most important issues and supports you to make decisions with confidence. Topics covered include:
- Desk research
- Problem framing
- Project management
- Recruiting
- Quantitative research
- Surveys
- Qualitative research
- Data coding
- Data analysis
- AI use in data analysis
Production Guide
Human-centered production teams build, products, services, programs, and systems that center on human needs and wants.
The HCD Production Guide shows your teams the complete production cycle from evidence to shippable solution. Topics covered include:
- Project management
- References
- Production roles & responsibilities
- Prototyping
- Testing
- Storyboards
- Card sorts
- Narratives
- Iteration
- Divergent thinking
- Convergent thinking
Delivery Guide
The HCD Delivery Guide addresses the implementation phase—when products, services, or systems are released to customers, acknowledging that offerings inevitably change once they encounter real-world use regardless of how well they were researched and designed. Topics include:
- Change management
- Roles & Responsibilities
- Organizational training
- Marketing
- Launching
- Unique Value Propositions (UVP)
- Target personas
- Sustainment & sustainment rules
Measurement Guide
In the HCD Measurement Guide, your teams will learn how to implement measurement strategies using "compiled indicators".
This approach:
- Allows for the measurement of indirectly measurable situations without requiring control over all variables
- Uses accessible computational methods rather than sophisticated statistical modeling
- Is based on research from major global institutions including USAID, OECD, and the European Union's Eurostat.
Topics covered include:
- Composite indicators
- Compiled indicators
- Qualitative data analysis
- Quantitative data analysis
- Historical data
- Data storytelling
- Value determination
- Data normalization
End-to-End Human-Centered Design Methodology for Innovation and Process Improvement
The complete Human-Centered Design (HCD) Guide Series provides the full systematic methodology for innovation and process improvement projects—from discovery through production, delivery, and measurement. Purchase all four guides together (Discovery, Production, Delivery, Measurement) for $84.99 and save over 10% compared to buying individually.
Unlike incomplete frameworks like Agile (production only), Design Thinking (stops at ideation), or consultant playbooks (creates dependency), the HCD Guide Series is the only field-tested, end-to-end customer experience and innovation system designed for practitioners working in real-world constraints. If you've been patching together discovery methods from one source, Agile from another, and measurement from a third, this complete series eliminates the gaps where good work dies at phase transitions.
Proven from Nordstrom to NASA, the HCD methodology puts humans at the center of every step—helping you avoid unnecessary technical debt, organizational friction, and expensive platform investments.
The complete guide series gives you repeatable craft that builds your capability instead of requiring expensive experts, with modular guidance that works whether you're facing expansive complex problems or managing multiple discrete projects across your team.
Why both “human centered” and “human-centered”?
Great catch; you're right! Both “human centered” and “human-centered” appear on this and all our other pages, and this is for one reason: to help people find these resources.
In our research in building this website, we found that people search the term “human centered” far more often than they search the term “human-centered”, so, while the version with the hyphen is grammatically correct, we use the unhyphenated version as well so we can meet people where they are.
This isn’t a grammar course; this is human-centered design, and sometimes, humans don’t bother to hyphenate.