1. Leveraging human-centered design to implement modern psychological science: Return on an early investment
- Author
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Patricia A. Areán, Stephanie K. Brewer, and Aaron R. Lyon
- Subjects
Knowledge management ,Product design ,business.industry ,05 social sciences ,Behavioural sciences ,050109 social psychology ,Usability ,General Medicine ,PsycINFO ,Article ,Psychological Theory ,New product development ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Implementation research ,business ,Psychology ,General Psychology ,User-centered design - Abstract
Although classic models of implementation emphasized the importance of innovation characteristics in their adoption and sustained use, contemporary implementation research and practice have deprioritized these variables. Human-centered design (HCD) is an approach that grounds product development in information collected about the people and settings that will ultimately use those products. HCD has strong roots in psychological theory, but its application is typically limited to the development of digital technologies. HCD is rarely applied to the design of psychosocial innovations — including both service-recipient-facing interventions and implementation strategies — within the applied psychological disciplines. The current paper reviews the psychological origins of HCD and details pathways through which HCD theories and methods can be leveraged to advance the “core tasks” of contemporary implementation research and practice in psychology. These include (1) identification of multilevel implementation determinants through specification of user needs and contexts; (2) tailoring of implementation strategies, such as contextually-driven intervention redesign; and (3) evaluating implementation mechanisms and outcomes, including disentangling how the core HCD focus on usability relates to closely associated implementation variables such as acceptability, feasibility, and appropriateness. Collectively, these applications provide directions through which to leverage the mature field of HCD, maximize psychology’s return on its early theoretical investment, and promote the large-scale impact of findings from across the applied fields of psychology. PUBLIC HEALTH SIGNIFICANCE: Most effective innovations from psychological science are used rarely in routine practice, greatly reducing their public health impact. Human-centered design provides methods and tools through which innovations — and the implementation processes that support them — can be developed or redesigned to ensure public health impact.
- Published
- 2020