What makes DesignOvation different?
Our approach to designing products and services entails core tenants of design thinking and the theories of disruptive innovation. Learn more about our approach and tell us about your needs!
Human Centered Design
All Designovation approaches are rooted in the principles of Human-Centered Design (HCD), a core tenant of design thinking. HCD is an approach to problem-solving and design that focuses on understanding and addressing the needs, behaviors, and experiences of the people for whom the solution or product is being designed. It is a creative and iterative process that puts the user at the heart of every design decision, ensuring that the final outcome is not only functional but also meaningful and effective for its intended audience.
Key Principles of Human-Centered Design:
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Empathy:
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Understanding the User:
The design process begins by developing a deep understanding of the users—who they are, what they need, how they behave, and the challenges they face. This is typically done through user research techniques like interviews, surveys, observation, and empathy mapping.
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Focus on Real People:
Solutions are designed around real users’ perspectives, motivations, and pain points, ensuring that products or services are aligned with their needs.
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Collaboration:
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Cross-Disciplinary Teams:
HCD encourages collaboration among designers, developers, stakeholders, and users to create a holistic solution. Each team member contributes their expertise while keeping the user in focus.
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Co-Creation with Users:
Users are often involved in the design process through workshops, prototype testing, and feedback loops. Their input helps refine and validate design concepts.
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Iterative Process:
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Prototyping and Testing:
HCD emphasizes rapid prototyping and frequent testing. By creating low-fidelity prototypes, designers can quickly test ideas with users and refine them based on feedback. This ensures the final product is well-aligned with user needs.
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Continuous Improvement:
The process of designing, testing, and refining is repeated in cycles until the design is optimized for the users.
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User-Centered Decision Making:
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User Feedback Drives Design:
Decisions are informed by data from user research and testing rather than assumptions. Every design element is evaluated based on how it improves or impacts the user experience.
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Prioritizing Usability and Accessibility:
HCD focuses on ensuring that solutions are easy to use and accessible to all users, regardless of their abilities or backgrounds.
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Problem-Solving Focus:
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Understanding the Problem:
HCD begins with a thorough exploration of the problem space. Designers invest time in understanding the core problem from the users' perspectives before jumping to solutions.
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Solution Tailored to User Needs:
Instead of designing for what might seem like the ideal solution, the process revolves around crafting something that works within the real-world context of the user.
Benefits of Human-Centered Design:
Increased Usability: By focusing on the user from the start, products and services are more intuitive and easy to use.
Higher User Satisfaction: Solutions designed with user input are more likely to meet their expectations and needs, leading to higher satisfaction.
Reduced Development Costs: By identifying issues early in the design process through user testing, teams avoid costly redesigns later in the project.
Innovative Solutions: HCD often leads to innovative products because it challenges teams to think from the user's perspective and address real-world problems.
For the public sector, HCD approaches improve citizen services by making government more accessible and responsive to users’ needs by:
Ensuring usability and a seamless user experience in software and application development
Enabling accessibility and user-friendliness in healthcare devices and patient experiences
Enhancing customer interactions and experiences at every touchpoint in citizen service delivery
Human-Centered Design (HCD) is a powerful approach to design that ensures that products, services, or solutions are deeply connected to the needs, expectations, and behaviors of users. By prioritizing empathy, collaboration, and continuous iteration, HCD leads to outcomes that are not only functional but also highly usable and meaningful to the people they serve.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
DO Strategies is comprised of a diverse workforce with a collaborative approach that harvests the differences in thought, background, experience and opinion that valued team members bring to the table.
Rangena was born in Kandahar, Afghanistan and raised in the United States. DO values employees from all over the world and strives to build an environment of inclusion where each can thrive!
Design Thinking
DesignOvation’s design thinking approach builds a virtuous cycle of innovation for both products and services with five distinct steps:
Empathize: understanding people to truly understand their wants, needs and what they may not need
Define: figuring out the problem down to specifics in order to pinpoint a solution
Ideate: generating ideas, whether out-of-the-box, pie-in-the-sky or simple solutions, everything is on the table
Prototype: creating and experimenting quickly while allowing users to see, touch and test a solution
Test: refining a product through testing with user to apply feedback iteratively
Disruptive Innovation
Disruptive innovation describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market,’ eventually displacing established competitors. In contrast, sustaining innovation improves existing products or services, typically adding performance but at a higher cost—and, typically, greater complexity.
Applying these theories to the public sector leads to lower cost solutions that serve a greater variety of customers. The theories of disruptive innovation were defined by renown Harvard Business School Professor, the late Clayton Christensen, a mentor to our CEO, Rangena Hotaki
Our human-centered design frameworks embed emerging technology, industry best practices and applicable regulatory requirements to meet mission needs. Some examples follow below.
During any software development life cycle, a User Design phase allows our designers to work hand-in-hand with end users to ensure their needs are being met at every step in the design process. For example, in Rapid Agile Delivery, Design Thinking enables designers to build requirements, developers to create prototypes and end users to test prototypes to ensure the end product meets their expectations. The bugs and kinks are worked out in an iterative process. The designer guides the process, collaborating with the developers and end users; they come together to communicate on what worked well and what didn’t, tweaking as they go until they reach the optimal design.
Customer Experience (CX) refers to the overall interaction and perception that an end user has when they interact with a product, service, or organization across various touch points and channels. It encompasses all the emotions, feelings, and perceptions that customers experience throughout their entire journey, from initial awareness to post-transaction and beyond. CX transforms how public sector entities interact with citizens, with the goal of improving satisfaction, engagement, and overall interactions with agencies and services. While the Federal sector operates differently from the private sector, the underlying concepts of CX can be adapted to create more efficient, effective, and citizen-centric government services.
The Learner Experience (LX) framework focuses on optimizing the learning journey and outcomes for individuals engaging in educational or training programs. It creates holistic and learner-centric products, taking into account the needs, preferences, and goals of learners. LX creates engaging, effective, and supportive learning experiences that go beyond just delivering content. It considers various aspects of the learner's journey, including before, during, and after the learning process.
Employee Experience (EX) refers to the holistic journey of public employees as they interact with their workplace, including the physical, cultural, technological, and emotional aspects of their environment. In the public sector, where employees work in government agencies, non-profit organizations, and similar entities, EX takes on unique dimensions influenced by public service missions, bureaucratic structures, and community impact. Designovation works to improve the overall employee experience—through better technology, training, leadership engagement, and enhancing processes, culture and data—public sector organizations can create more engaged, motivated, and effective workforces. Ultimately, improving EX in the public sector directly enhances the quality of service provided to the public and strengthens the organization's ability to meet its mission.