Human-centred Design: Existing Approaches and a Future Research Agenda

This paper presents an analysis of Human-Centred Design (HCD), using a metatriangulation of scientific literature. This metatriangulation comprises a systematic overview of recent HCD research, in which literature is categorised and analysed using both engineering lens and cognitive science paradigmatic lenses. The study reveals that the most popular HCD approaches do not accommodate software aimed at a broad or anonymous user-base. This shortcoming can be attributed, at least in part, to the popularity of HCD approaches focusing on highly-conscious user cognition based on conceptual models. These forms of cognition rely upon learned conventions and accumulated understanding and, as a result, design approaches focusing upon them are fundamentally limited to catering for a specific subset of the human population. We identify an emerging HCD approach, which we label “Foundational Design.” This approach focuses on cognitive regularities which exist in less-conscious processing, independent of culture or individual experience, and thus possibly offers a solution to the dilemma described above. Thus a future research agenda focused on the Foundational Design approach and the emerging NeuroIS research stream is proposed and discussed.