Human-centered design has been a guiding principle in the field for nearly two decades. Start with the person. Understand their needs, their pain points, their barriers. Design from there. It's a compelling idea, and most practitioners believe in it.
The problem is not the principle. The problem is what happens to it once the work gets underway.
Where Human-Centeredness Breaks Down
Early in a project, the human is front and center. Research informs direction. Insights shape decisions. The person feels present in the room.
Then the product gets closer to delivery. Budgets tighten. Competitive parity becomes a priority. Stakeholders start asking about return on investment, daily active users, monthly active users, click rates, and conversion. These are not bad questions. They are the language of business, and business has a thousand ways to measure its success.
The human, by comparison, has very few. And without a way to measure the human experience in terms that hold up in a business conversation, the person gradually disappears from the process. Not because anyone decided to abandon them, but because the metrics that track them simply stopped being visible.
This is not a values failure. It is a measurement gap.
Flourishing as a Framework, Not a Philosophy
The Harvard Human Flourishing Program has identified six domains of human experience that are universally desired across cultures, fields, and contexts. These domains have been used to assess the state of human experience in workplaces, medical settings, and educational environments. They are not abstract. They are measurable.
Three of those domains offer a practical starting point for design work: mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, and relationships and community.
When these domains are translated into product experience, they become concrete design criteria. Mental and physical health shows up as orientation: giving users a clear sense of where they are and what comes next. Meaning and purpose shows up as intent alignment: ensuring that the actions a product asks of its users match the stated goals they came with. Relationships and community show up as named accountability: making sure someone, not just a system, is responsible for what the user experiences.
These are not soft ideals. They are design qualities that can be evaluated, tested, and improved.
Making People Measurable
The goal is not to reduce the human experience to a number. The goal is to give human outcomes the same visibility that business outcomes already have, so that the person stays present in decisions that would otherwise be made without them.
When a designer or researcher can walk into a conversation with a stakeholder and say, "Here is how this feature supports meaning and purpose for the user, and here is how that connects to retention," the conversation changes. It is no longer a debate between people and profit. It becomes a question of integration: how do we build products where supporting the human and supporting the business are the same move?
That is the more productive fight. Not toppling the metrics that businesses rely on, but earning a seat at the table by speaking their language while keeping the human in view.
What the Workshop Tested
The approach was put into practice with a group of designers at the IDSA Women in Design chapter. Participants were given real product experiences and asked to identify where human flourishing could be better supported. Then they worked through the harder question: which business metrics would actually improve if the human experience improved in those areas?
The exercise surfaced something important. The connection between human outcomes and business outcomes is not always obvious, but it is there. And once people start to see it, the conversation about why human flourishing belongs in the design process becomes much easier to have.
The workshop is still being refined. The next iteration will tighten the structure, reduce the range of choices, and focus the group discussion so that participants leave with a clearer, more shared understanding of how to make this argument in their own organizations.
The Longer Game
Human-centered design is not the problem. The problem is that it tends to disappear somewhere between discovery and delivery, right when the pressures of building something real start to compete with the intention of building something good.
Flourishing is not a replacement for human-centered design. It is a way to extend it across the full arc of the product lifecycle, giving teams the language and the metrics to keep the person in the conversation all the way through. When products are built that way, the people using them are better served. And when people are better served, they stay. That is not a philosophical argument. It is a business one.
