Utilizing Co-design to Create Market-driven Products
By Patrick Howell, Neubloc, VP of Product Evolution Design
What is this and who is buying it? Read this quote from an actual press release:
"Our goal was to develop a product that would rival the consumer impact of the microwave. In order to make this a reality, the design would need to integrate numerous technology features while remaining accessible to Internet beginners as well as savvy PC users... we feel the iCEBOX product is going to be standard fare in many of the homes of the future."
What homes? What future? WHO is going to access the Internet, play DVDs, and use a remote controlled PC while cooking in the kitchen? Sounds like a group of designers in a small room decided it would be a cool idea... especially given it represented an engineering challenge to integrate these disparate technologies into a box!
Try to avoid making this mistake. To design a successful product, you have to figure out who is going to use it and understand what problem it is solving. You may think your idea for a new product is so fabulous that everyone will want it, but how do you know? Unfortunately many products are conceived in following way:
"What a great idea! I don't know what market problem it solves or what market need it fills, but it I know 'I' will like it."
The critical questions aren't answered.
History suggests products designed in this way will be market failures as they suffer from Square Peg Syndrome - designing a square peg to fit into a round hole. Design does not meet reality. The target market needs a product in the form of a circle, yet the designer/engineer creates a box.
Why does this happen? Most products today are never influenced nor validated by the people that buy and use them. But let's take it one step further... they are not co-designed by the intended audience.
What is Co-Design?
Co-design is a participatory design practice utilizing User-Centered Design (UCD), but most importantly it involves targeted users (whether they will be responsible for buying the product or simply using it) to create market-driven products that ultimately drive more customer demand, user adoption, satisfaction and most importantly, product profitability. It integrates seamlessly with market-driven product management practices, both strategic and tactical, incorporating research and testing techniques to understand a product's relevance and to validate its future market acceptance.
Designers are typically not users of a given product, yet today most products are designed and engineered with little or no customer or user involvement. Some designers gather information from users, define requirements, and hopefully reflect what they learned in the proposed design. After bringing the product to market, targeted users either use it or not. It's a pretty risky proposition NOT understanding in advance how it may or may not be received by the targeted audience.
The alternative - Co-Design -- rejects this approach. Co-designed products are created with designers, customers and/or users working together collaboratively. It is not just a process -- it's a philosophy. The designer holds target users in high esteem and considers them experts in the product area because they ARE. They expect customers and users to participate as equal members on the design team. Designers will not have the same passion about something the target audience wants or what they are trying to achieve. Nor will designers have a deep understanding of their reality, therefore, their role in this process is crucial to design a market-driven product.
Co-designed products have many ROI benefits. Most software design decisions are typically made during the first 10% of the design and development process and can determine 90% of a product's cost and performance (Aaron Marcus and Associates). By getting users involved to co-design the product early on, you can avoid the costly fixes later due to committing expensive resources and time without a user-centric design.
Co-Design Integrated with Product Management
"The aim of product management is to know and understand the market so well that the product or service fits him (user/buyer) and sells itself." -- Peter Drucker
Co-design practices integrate with market-driven product management practices both strategically and tactically to help identify what the market problems are and how to solve them. By interacting, observing, and understanding what users need - market analysis - and by bringing target users in from the outside to design products - product planning and product design - co-design increases the likelihood of product management success (and the product!).
Market Research - Discovering the "What"
Through user research or contextual inquiry - the study of users in their usage environment(s) - product managers and designers are able to identify 'problem opportunities' and verify them by observing and gathering field data from users in their daily context. The benefits are two-fold. In addition to discovering potential product opportunities, the more time you spend to understand user context, the less time and money you will spend solving the problem. After data gathering and analysis, 'contextual' knowledge serves as the initial input to create user personas, scenarios and eventually a design solution.
Interviews, user observation, and user surveys are data gathering techniques used to understand user goals and tasks. Unlike traditional interviews, which are time consuming and met with negativity, these techniques consist of watching users do their work and interact with colleagues, requiring less of users' time. We are looking for following. Are they efficient? Do they have the information they need? What information is most relevant? What are the environment conditions like? Are there environment constraints? What is automated vs. manual? What is missing? The goal is to gather as much data as possible from these exercises for a compelling analysis.
For example, we performed studies at a leading consumer electronics superstore to research how consumers shop for big-ticket items. We discovered a number of problem opportunities. Through indirect observation, the sales staff did not understand comparable differences between competing stereo products. Additionally, available product literature was feature specific, providing absolutely no insight to product quality. Consumers did not have the information needed to make an informed buying decision for expensive products. It was a lose-lose situation for consumer and seller. We clarified this problem by conducting consumer interviews.
What if the consumer had a software product on a wireless device, at the point of shopping, that allowed them to compare products? What if they had in-store access to consumer reviews about each product? Knowing the store was suffering from high attrition with their sales staff, would this be a good product to help them move more big-tickets items? Would this application be a good software solution on a device or mobile phone to increase its value? Using these research techniques with actual consumers, a potential new product was discovered.
Product Planning and Co-design - "How" to Solve the Problem
A product must be designed to enable users to achieve goals, effectively and efficiently making his/her tasks easier to perform with the product than without it. Clearly defining who will be using the product is the most critical step before co-design can begin. User personas (profiles) are created to baseline user needs, expectations, demographics and target market segmentation. The persona includes defining what his/her needs are, describing user access to available technology and information, and defines what types of problems they currently have. It describes the user's context. The user persona is used as the foundation for the co-design direction (and perhaps even future promotion). In essence it bridges the 'what' with the 'how'.
Planning and setting up a co-design environment (physical or virtual) is essential to work together to create a solution.
Be Prepared
Proper planning is essential to conduct a co-design workshop. Review all of your research and analysis to ensure thorough knowledge of the problem domain. How are users accomplishing things today and what are the issues? Create user scenarios that represent current use workflows to utilize during the co-design session. Prepare an agenda with a clear understanding and purpose of each agenda item, and the techniques you will use. Confirm attendees and ensure all participants are notified of dates and times.
Attendees participating should include:
- One facilitators with a second facilitator or note-taker to ensure more detailed field notes are gathered and mostly importantly, provide another set of 'eyes' to catch things that could get missed.
- Minimum of two targeted users and ideally 7 to 8 maximum.
- One developer (engineer) or more depending on your organization. A developer will gain insight and user context, which will help to get others to buy-in to your methods and future prototypes.
Reserve the right type of space-participants must be comfortable during the workshop. Plan to use flipcharts and post-it notes to capture details and concepts. Make sure to have plenty of table space and a whiteboard. Bring a digital camera to capture whiteboard notes and concepts.
Users are the Experts
Before conducting the session remember to ensure you give users a voice in the co-design process. They know more than you do about their jobs or experience, their use environments, and their needs and wants. Understand that they are never wrong - don't tell them what they should do (don't lead them, they often will simply follow). Lastly, remember who will be buying the product after its release.
Make it a priority to identify product champion(s). These customers/users are incredibly creative and provide fantastic product ideas and solutions. They will want to stay involved long-term.
Conducting a Co-design Session
Having eight or more people in a given room at the same time can be challenging- providing structure will keep the workshop focused and productive. Clearly communicate the agenda. Start with introductions. With the facilitator going first to break the ice -let participants introduce themselves to become familiar with one another. After introductions, provide them with a quick overview of what usability means... this will be an opportunity to get participants thinking about useable products and why they are participating as experts. Clearly communicate objectives and expectations and identify what each participant expects as an outcome of the workshop.
Referencing user scenario diagrams, discuss existing system and domain issues and validate the workflow. Be sure to capture refinements through diagramming to extract and structure the issues. It puts your participants into proper context. When finished identify and document the usability goals that the design must meet. Does the product need to enable efficiency? Does it need to be easy to learn? How frequently will it be used?
After goals have been defined and are visible to all participants, may the co-design exercise begin! Use some unfinished concepts or competing products as a catalyst, good and bad, to get the creative juices flowing. You will learn just as much from the bad ideas as you will the good, but most importantly your participants will be encouraged to contribute. Encourage users for concepts, but never reject an idea, simply put it on the back burner for future use or another need. When hearing suggestions, have that person illustrate/draw the concept rather than the facilitator. It will create a sense of ownership. Tape concepts and screens (if a software product) to the wall for all to see. Keep moving around the room to keep it interactive and exciting... the more fun participants are having the better the design session.
The co-design process is iterative. After the session, the designer uses the output of the workshop as a design input. After a high-level prototype product has been developed, conduct a usability study to test the refined design. Users aren't off the hook yet! This form of testing is performed one-on-one between facilitator and user. Through structured usability testing of tasks, the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of the design can be measured without leading or influencing users. Target users will give you valuable insight and feedback again, which will help refine the design before expensive development begins. Depending on the complexity and size of the design effort, this step is often repeated to cover different features and/or design enhancements.
Post Release
Before release, create mechanisms to monitor what users and buyers think of your product. Build an online community experience that allows users and buyers of your product to share ideas with one another. Users will openly discuss popular features and those that are not. You will literally get a glimpse to future improvements.
In addition, users may provide insight to unintended uses of the product. Either a new market opportunity or new feature ideas will surface. The best way to maintain the lifecycle of your product is to know what users will want in the future.
Conclusion
Co-design practices will truly help you understand your target audience and what your market-driven product should be and will be. It provides tremendous ROI benefits and integrates with and enhances market-driven Product Management practices. It even gives you piece of mind before you make expensive development investments. Not all of these practices are necessary or even practical in many cases. Simply put, the more you involve your target audience the more likely the market will choose your product over the competition.
To learn more about co-design and usablity practices, please contact:
Patrick Howell
V.P. Product Evolution Design
Neubloc
Email: phowell@neubloc.com
Phone: (619) 322-6321
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