In summary:
- Increasing exposure hours to real users helps teams build a shared understanding and keep user needs at the centre of design decisions.
- Embracing co-design and creating meaningful personas based on real research ensures solutions meet genuine user needs and reduce project risks.
- Sharing user research stories and writing user stories based on actual needs fosters empathy, prioritises features and drives people-centred outcomes.
Research tells us that organisations with strong people-centred maturity see better outcomes: higher engagement, more satisfied employees and faster, clearer decisions. They design and deliver services that work for the people who use them, and they are better able to adapt when needs change.
A major part of this maturity is keeping users front and centre of everyday work. That takes more than intent. It requires habits and behaviours that help teams stay connected to real needs rather than internal assumptions.
Here are five practical principles that help organisations maintain a consistent focus on the people they serve.
1. Increase exposure hours
First and foremost, increase the number of hours each team member is exposed to real users interacting with your product or designs.
Author and UX consultant Jared M. Spool determined that a bare minimum of two hours of exposure to users every six weeks is needed to see significant improvements in products. Any less frequent than that and the users and their needs are unlikely to be front and centre of the teams’ minds.
You can make this easy. Stream sessions live. Record clips. Bring teams together to watch short highlights. The aim is simple: help everyone build a shared, grounded understanding of the people you serve.
2. Embrace co-design
Don’t just design for people. Design with them. Involve your users in the design process itself by carrying out sessions where users and the design team help to co-create new solutions as equal partners. These are the people who will be most impacted by design decisions. Who better to ensure the designs meet their needs and are usable than your users themselves?
Start early on in the design process and continue throughout. Co-design brings you so much closer to your users, helping to uncover their true needs and wants, and in turn lowering the risk and cost of projects.
3. Create meaningful personas
Creating assets that represent customers is a great way of keeping your customers in mind throughout the design process. Personas that reflect your customers’ relevant needs, motivations, desired end-states and behavioural characteristics in different circumstances can be really powerful. Highlighting emotional experiences too really brings them to life and makes them more relatable. For example, what frustrates them, what makes them happy etc.
Personas should be based on real user research and avoid using demographics (e.g. age, gender, ethnicity, income etc) – these are not inclusive and play into stereotypes.
To ensure personas don’t get forgotten about, ideally keep them visible, by integrating them into your existing tools, processes and ceremonies – piggybacking onto things that are already in place and referred to on a regular basis.
4. Share soundbites and stories from user research regularly
Frequently share things you’ve seen and heard in user research sessions – play clips from research, share quotes, and tell real stories that you’ve heard to bring your customers to life and build empathy. Don’t just save them for presentations and final reports, try getting into the habit of referring to them regularly throughout projects.
5. Create user stories based on real user needs
Rather than writing a list of features to be built, or just going straight into wireframing following research, write user stories that reflect real user needs.
A user story describes the type of user, their need, and why. This is a robust way of anchoring everything, and everyone, in the actual needs of people who will use the product or service. They stimulate important conversations, provide a way to prioritise features and allow you to look at problems in a different way and solve them creatively. User stories are also more likely to stay visible and be referred to throughout the project, maintaining that relentless focus on the customer that is so important.
Bringing it all together
Keeping users at the centre of decisions is not a single activity. It is a set of habits that shape how teams work, how services evolve and how organisations make choices. When teams stay connected to real needs, services improve and decisions become clearer and faster.
These five principles are straightforward but effective. Even adopting one or two can shift mindsets and strengthen people-centred practice.
If you’d like to understand your current level of people-centred maturity — and where to focus next — you can complete our People-Centred Maturity Assessment.