Strategies for Evaluating Human-centered Design: Methods, Cross-disciplinary Collaboration and Data Use

Abstract for a Skills-Building Workshop from the 2022 International SBCC Summit in Morocco: 

"Human-centered design (HCD) has increasingly been recognized as a valuable tool to tackle the complex challenges that the global health community faces and to address community needs by facilitating faster innovation, better collaboration, more effective scale, and elevating the voice and agency of vulnerable groups. Yet, traditional evaluation approaches are often not well suited to capture the value of HCD when applied in public health programming or to assess the outcomes of programs that are continuously adapting and improving. As a result, these traditional evaluation approaches need to be re-conceptualized. There is a growing body of evidence and practice from HCD programs with evaluation components that can be shared to support the crafting of new,innovative approaches to evaluation moving forward and for assessing the influence of HCD on behavior change.  Additionally, it is important for stakeholders from across the public health community of practice - implementers, funders, evaluators, and designers - to align on realistic expectations for the evaluation of HCD approaches. This workshop will offer participants up-to-date learning and new skills related to framing a monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) strategy for interventions that apply HCD. It will address the importance of understanding the anticipated influence and value of HCD in health programming, the need to balance expectations when applying measurement approaches (impact v learning and adaptation);and the critical nature of partnering and cross-disciplinary team communication practices to optimize the application of HCD and its link to program outcomes."