User-Centred Design without Involving Users: A Longitudinal Case Study in a Human-Centred-Design–Mature Company

Human-centred design has grown into a widely applied field that has produced a large number of standards, methods and guidelines for designing meaningful and usable products and services and direct contact to users seems to define whether a project is considered human-centric or not. However, as the field has grown more mature, companies have also matured in human-centredness, and thus, they have already accumulated user knowledge and may not need to start from the beginning in each project. This paper presents a case study of a human-centred-design–mature company, where first-hand access to users was blocked due to confidentiality. The project team had to rely on other sources of user knowledge. They utilized user representations that were based on earlier user studies and other sources, and the company also employed in-house users who gave their input in the product development process. Together these resulted in a successful design project.