From Human-Centered to Heart-Centered: Why I Stopped Building Around Pain Points
The Illusion of Human-Centered Design
For years, I was loyal to the playbook of human-centered design. Talk to your users, discover their pain points, build solutions around them. It sounded noble. It looked smart in a workshop. Sticky notes everywhere, empathy maps that made us feel… well, empathetic.
But let’s be honest: human-centered design has become capitalism’s favorite toy.
The formula is simple:
Find a friction in someone’s day.
Inflate it into a “major pain point.”
Pitch yourself as the savior with an app, a subscription, or—better yet—a lifestyle brand.
And we wonder why 90% of startups fail.
Startups: Masters at Solving Problems That Don’t Exist
Here’s the stat no one in your accelerator demo day wants to put on a slide:
42% of startups fail because there’s no market need. Translation: we’re inventing problems and then congratulating ourselves for solving them.
We call it “innovation.”
I’ve sat through decks where the “pain point” was basically: “People don’t realize they have this problem yet, but once we explain it to them, they’ll see they’re miserable without us.”
No, they won’t. They’ll just move on.
And in MENA, we’ve seen this movie before: Awok, Sprii, Wadi.com, The Modist, Yamsafer … and others I can’t even name because the NDAs still follow me. each wrapped itself in user-first language: cheaper, simpler, curated, localized, “finally someone cares.” And yet: shutdowns, liquidations, pivots to nowhere. Not because the personas were wrong, but because the needs weren’t deep or durable. The “pain” looked big on a slide but that was it.
All of them had glossy “human-centered” decks. All of them told compelling user stories. And yet the same ending: no real need, no staying power.
We forget sometimes that not every pain point needs fixing. People choose to live with certain frictions—not because they oppose improvement, but because life is full of trade-offs. And more often than not, decisions aren’t logical optimizations; they’re emotional calculations, where fear quietly outweighs convenience.
So, When Does Human-Centered Design Work?
Think Shein - I know!!
I know—they never parade themselves as following a “human-centered design” approach. But strip it down, and that’s exactly what Shein does. On paper it’s a master class, they zoomed in on a very real pain point—people want trendy clothes faster and cheaper—and solved it with ruthless efficiency.
Again, on paper, it’s a triumph:
A business model perfectly aligned with consumer desire.
Unprecedented speed of design-to-market.
Billions in revenue.
But peel back the surface:
Exploitative labor practices fuel the speed.
Environmental devastation follows mountains of disposable clothing.
Psychological harm—feeding endless comparison, dissatisfaction, and consumption addiction.
Shein proves that even when human-centered design “works,” it can work against us. It builds around human wants, but at the expense of human dignity, planetary health, and long-term well-being.
This is why heart-centered design matters. Because I now believe, after years of following this methodology that the human-centered question—“How might we?”—is in fact too small and narrow!
Enter Heart-Centered Design
This is why heart-centered design matters.
And no—it’s not just a poetic phrase. Heart-centered design has been proposed and practiced by designers, academics, and social entrepreneurs who were frustrated with HCD’s superficiality. Peter Gould, often called a pioneer of the movement, defines it as design “at the intersection of outward practice and the spiritual experience of beneficial inward transformation.” His six principles—Intentionality, Sincerity, Beauty, Gratitude, Service, and Trust—frame design as meaningful work inspired by spiritual aspirations.
In his words: design should be “for remembrance and meaning in an era of design for distraction”.
Academics echo this. In Design Science (Cambridge, 2019), researchers proposed Compassionate Design, calling for dignity, empowerment, and security to be treated as baseline needs in any design process. Practitioners like Jackie Colburn argue that heart-centered design is about tapping into values and service, not just business ROI, to build trust and psychological safety in teams.
At some point, I stopped asking, “What do humans need?” Because if we’re honest—if we go back to Maslow—the true non-negotiables are physiological and safety needs: food, water, shelter, security. Beyond that, it gets messy. What we call “needs” are often just wants dressed up in survival language.
The human mind is easily fooled. For someone trapped in comparison, a gadget or a status outfit can feel as urgent as bread on the table. That confusion is where HCD trips: it builds around the noise of desire, not the signal of truth.
So I started asking instead:
“How might we build from what the human heart truly longs for?”
That’s when things clicked.
Heart-centered design shifts the compass inward. Instead of amplifying desires, it nurtures deeper needs: wholeness, connection, dignity, peace.
It’s Not Just Theory - look around you
We’ve seen regional startups succeed by going deeper than wants and surface frictions:
O7 Therapy — Arabic-first online therapy bringing mental wellness to the Middle East. It isn’t just about filling appointment slots—it’s about dismantling stigma and building emotional safety at scale.
Hakini — Meaning “tell me” in Arabic, this platform offers culturally attuned self-help guidance and confidential teletherapy across the Levant. Its strength? A heart‑centered design tuned to Arab realities and emotional needs.
Re:Coded — Tech training for underserved and displaced youth that measures transformation, not just clicks. 2023 impact: 1,229 graduates and a 3.2× self-reported income increase post-program. That’s resonance you can feel and quantify.
The Giving Movement — Fashion with an explicit give-back: donations per item and a materials strategy aimed at reducing harm. Has donated millions of dollars while building a Gulf-born brand identity that ties consumption to contribution (imperfect, but intentioned).
Not engagement hacks or vanity metrics—these platforms meet the unspoken muscles of trust, belonging, livelihood, and emotional safety. That’s heart-center, not just user flows.These platforms prove that building from the heart—around trust, dignity, belonging—creates a resonance shallow “pain points” never could.
The Measure of Resonance
HCD loves easy-to-count numbers: clicks, downloads, churn, retention. But numbers don’t tell the full story.
Heart-centered design measures depth:
Self-reported transformation, not just usage stats.
Sustained trust, measured over years, not months.
Emotional alignment, reflected in how people feel seen and held, not just how fast they convert.
These are harder to measure—but infinitely harder to fake.
As Gould puts it, “Be mindful that in each person is a heart”
Why Should You Care?
Because the shift is much needed
Startup culture has become a factory of repetition. Delivery apps, productivity tools, marketplaces for things no one was begging for—each framed as the next “pain point solved,” each racing for growth curves and valuation.
And yet, the numbers don’t lie: In MENA, failed-founder surveys place “no market need” at the top of the failure pile—even above funding or team.
This isn’t just bad luck or poor execution, we’ve simply mistaken acceleration for progress.
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
— Isaac Asimov
We should know by now that accumulating data, tweaking interfaces, scaling faster—that’s not the same as growing wiser, kinder, more resilient. In startup culture, the obsession with moving fast often hides a bigger emptiness: what are we building for, beyond metrics?
Heart-centered design forces a harder question: What genuinely nourishes someone beyond convenience? Not skin-deep UX wins—but trust, coherence, emotional belonging that outlasts hype.
This matters because the old lens—chasing wants, velocity, convenience—is burning us out. We’re launching more products than ever, but our relationships with them—and each other—are growing thinner.
Human-centered design gave us a mirror to reflect desires.
Heart-centered design gives us a compass to navigate toward what truly endure
