Human-centered design training teaches teams to solve problems by starting with the people they serve: customers, patients, students, employees, or partners. Instead of guessing what people need, participants learn to listen, observe, find the real problem, and test ideas quickly before investing in a full solution.
Dr. Darin Eich and the InnovationTraining.org team design and lead human-centered design workshops for teams, leadership groups, and large offsites, in person or virtually. Every session is customized, and participants practice on a real challenge from your organization, so the learning carries straight back into their work.
What Clients and Participants Say
“People who did not think they had the capacity to innovate left with ideas, solutions and renewed energy for the project.”
“The room was ELECTRIC … Participants co-created solutions, prototyped ideas, and walked away with actionable options for innovating culture in our workplaces.”
“He incorporated our topics into his materials to make for a personalized and real experience for the dozens of engineers and managers attending this event.”
What Is Human-Centered Design?
Human-centered design (HCD) is an approach to problem solving that keeps the people affected by a solution at the center of every step. Teams build empathy for those people, define the problem from their point of view, generate many possible ideas, and then prototype and test the most promising ones with real users. The approach was popularized by design firms such as IDEO and is now used in product development, healthcare, education, government services, and internal work like onboarding, learning programs, and culture change.
Human-centered design and design thinking overlap heavily. A useful way to see the difference: human-centered design describes the philosophy of designing with and for people, while design thinking describes the process and toolkit teams use to do it. In our workshops we teach both together, along with the human-centered design mindsets that make the methods work.
Human-Centered Design Workshop Options
Choose a single topic, combine several into a full-day program, or spread them across a series. Each option below can be adapted for your industry, group size, and challenge.
Human-Centered Design Foundations
Human-Centered Design Fundamentals
Take one real challenge from first insight to a tested prototype and learn the full human-centered design cycle by doing it.
Human-Centered Design Mindsets
Build the habits behind the methods: curiosity, empathy, comfort with ambiguity, a bias toward action, and learning from feedback.
Design Thinking Training for Teams
Learn and apply the design thinking process in a hands-on session with a custom agenda. See our design thinking training workshops for sample agendas.
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Understanding the People You Serve
Customer and Stakeholder Interviews
Practice asking open questions, listening for underlying needs, and turning what you hear into usable insight. Our empathy training guide covers the foundations.
Empathy Mapping
Capture what people say, think, do, and feel so your team shares one clear picture of the person you are designing for. Start with our empathy map templates.
Journey Mapping
Map the full experience of a customer, patient, student, or employee to find the moments that matter most and the pain points worth fixing. Learn more about our journey mapping workshop.
Jobs to Be Done
Understand the progress people are trying to make so you can design for the real need behind the request. See our Jobs to Be Done training.
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Ideas, Prototypes, and Testing
Ideation Around “How Might We” Questions
Reframe problems as opportunities and generate a wide range of ideas before choosing which to pursue. Our innovation and brainstorming workshops go deeper on ideation.
Rapid Prototyping and User Testing
Build quick, low-cost versions of an idea, put them in front of real users, and learn what to keep, change, or drop.
Human-Centered Design With AI
Use AI to support research synthesis, idea generation, and prototyping while keeping real people at the center of the work. See our design thinking AI training.
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Applying Human-Centered Design in Your Organization
Human-Centered Design in Healthcare and Life Sciences
Apply HCD to patient experience, clinical workflows, and product development, drawing on healthcare examples and work in medical devices and pharma.
Human-Centered Design for Engineering and Design Firms
Bring client and end-user insight into technical projects so teams solve the right problem before they engineer the solution. See our workshops for engineering and design firms.
Human-Centered Design Offsites and Summits
Engage a large group, from a leadership team to 200 or more people, in designing solutions to shared challenges at your offsite, retreat, or summit.
Train Your Internal Facilitators
Build the skills of the people who will lead human-centered design work after the workshop ends through our facilitation workshop or our online train-the-trainer program.
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Who Human-Centered Design Training Is For
Our human-centered design workshops serve product and service teams, innovation groups, HR and learning and development teams, healthcare and higher education leaders, and leadership development programs. They work well for teams new to the approach and for experienced groups who want to apply it more consistently. Because participants work on their own challenge, the session is useful whether the goal is a better customer experience, a stronger internal process, or a culture that innovates more often.
Formats and Group Sizes
Sessions run as half-day or full-day workshops, multi-session series, offsite programs, or modules within a leadership program. We deliver in person or virtually, for groups ranging from a single team to large conferences and offsites. Every agenda is designed around your goals, your people, and the challenge you want to make progress on.
What Participants Leave With
Participants leave with a working understanding of the human-centered design process, practice with the core methods, and real progress on a challenge that matters to your organization. Teams also leave with a shared language and a set of tools they can use again in their next project.
Human-Centered Design Certificates
Some organizations want a credential to recognize the skills their people build. We can pair workshops with coaching, online courses, and applied projects as part of a design thinking certificate program. Read more about design thinking certification options.
Watch: Design Thinking for Innovation Leadership Programs
More Human-Centered Design Resources
Keep learning with our list of the top books on human-centered design, our roundup of human-centered design resources, and our free customer and stakeholder interview training tool, which includes a self-assessment and a discovery interview playbook.
Plan Your Human-Centered Design Workshop
Tell us about your group, your goals, and the challenge you want to work on, and we will design a session around it. Contact us to get started.