Human-Centered Design 101: Unpacking the "Why" with noodle
Are you building products, services, or systems based on assumptions, or are you designing for real human realities?
Most organizations treat research as a series of episodic "one-offs". This creates Knowledge Silos (where marketing knows something that product teams don’t), leads to Institutional Amnesia (where the lessons of 2024 are forgotten by 2026), and forces you to pay a heavy Silo Tax (paying to answer the same question across different departments).
Knowledge without action is just data. If you have plenty of analytics but still struggle to understand why your users behave the way they do, it’s time to escape the Insight Island.
Join us for an interactive, 30-to-40 minute keynote followed by open conversation and networking. Together, we’ll explore how to flip the traditional problem-solving model on its head and design better experiences through shared understanding.
What We’ll Explore Together:
The Mindset vs. The Method: What Human-Centered Design (HCD) actually is, how it builds off qualitative research.
The noodle Process: A deep-dive into our five-step loop—Framing, Empathizing, Translating, Testing, and Determining—and how to use it to bridge the gap between "knowing" and "doing".
Real-World Case Studies (No Fluff): We'll unpack behind-the-scenes stories of how these methods actually work in practice.
Who This Event is For:
Founders & Entrepreneurs who want to validate their product-market fit before writing code or spending capital.
Product Managers & UX Designers looking to cultivate deep empathy and uncover latent user pain points.
Marketers & Strategists aiming to trade risky assumptions for evidence-backed brand loyalty.
Anyone who is simply curious about anthropology, ethnography, and how deep human listening drives massive real-world impact.
Meet Your Hosts:
We are noodle, a boutique qualitative research and strategy agency helping teams understand the "why" behind human behavior.
Anna Lawton (Managing Partner & Co-founder): A business anthropologist, applied ethnographer, and market researcher with extensive experience helping teams zoom out to see the bigger picture.
Kevin Shane (Partner & Co-founder): A qualitative researcher, human-centered designer, and strategic facilitator expert at translating messy human realities into actionable strategy.