Hidden in the history of the birth of the shopping cart product design skills

In the design process, the smooth is always the same, but when the twists and turns, the situation is always various. Product design will always encounter troughs, how to deal with problems, how to upgrade and iterative, the experience of predecessors sometimes is quite enlightening. The answer is in today's article about how the shopping cart we know is born and what problems it encounters.

There is something you must use every time you go to the supermarket to sweep the goods, the shopping cart. In China, the massive popularity of shopping carts has been a fact of the past 20 years, but in the United States it has been around for decades, and even many small shops and grocery stores are equipped. Interestingly, the design of the shopping cart is also twists. The designer of the cart, Sylvan Goldman Sachs, has experienced many of the various problems that designers will encounter in the process of completing this design, and it may give you a lot of inspiration to revisit the design process of this product.

Compared to other products, the birth history of the shopping cart is insignificant, but this part of the unknown process, involving design, marketing and even psychology, its experience can even be directly applied to today's design process.

　　So, let's get started.

　　Repeated revisions are key

In fact, the original design of some folding seats is the inspiration for the early prototype of the shopping cart. The original shopping cart was far from perfect, but it did have a revolutionary impact on the retail business. Sylvan and his colleagues have undergone numerous adjustments and revisions to the prototype, adjustment and modification of the shopping cart that we are familiar with today, which is undoubtedly the most critical part of the process.

First they had to solve the security problem-when the early shopping cart prototypes came into the market, they observed mothers taking their children to the supermarket and putting them in their shopping carts. On the one hand, children occupy a lot of space, make shopping cart can not put anything, on the other hand, is also the most critical, the early shopping cart did not have the corresponding security design, it is undoubtedly dangerous.

In fact, designers all over the world have almost the habit of spitting customers. But the slot is not a bad thing, and the slot has spawned a designer-led product modification that is critical to product design. For designers, the first one or two ideas may be the key to giving birth to a product and making it "good enough for customers," but from a creative and creative point of view, it may be the shackles of subsequent development.

Taking the most explicit criticism of the customer as a new challenge to product design will make it possible to discover the mistakes and omissions that have never been noticed, to explore more possible areas and to elevate the functionality, experience, and design of the product to a higher level.

　Identify selling points

Today's consumers, for the current design of the shopping cart is the most of its inefficient control, steering difficult, direction control is difficult to easily ruyi, which makes the supermarket shopping cart "rear-end collision" frequently. But as early as the 1930s, grocery owners were more interested in small-capacity shopping carts than in other versions.

Before Sylvan invented the shopping cart, the shopping baskets that people used were usually made of wicker or steel wire, large in size, especially heavy. Plus the fact that Americans have a shopping habit of buying more than one day of food, shopping baskets are easy to fill, so it's really hard to go shopping with heavy items. At this time, the clerk needs to help the guests to put the full basket on the counter, and then give them the empty shopping basket to continue shopping. These shopping baskets not only occupy a lot of places in the store, but also very difficult to use. In this complaint, Sylvan found that the folding shopping box may be the savior of the major stores.

It's important for designers to think deeply about the selling points of your product design, but this is a selling point that takes into account not only your customers, but also the actual needs and pain points of your customer's customers, end consumers. As a result, shopping carts are best to occupy a smaller space for the store, and consumers need a more relaxed and convenient shopping vehicle.

If your design can make your customers happy, good returns are predictable, but if the final consumer is dissatisfied with your design, discontent will naturally feed back to your customers and ultimately affect your income. It is in this context, Sylvan through the user in-depth understanding, with the help of these hands to outline the prototype of the cart, and sold the idea to his customers.

　　Get to know your users

Believe it or not, the biggest problem facing Sylvan is neither the development of the shopping cart model nor the perfection and adjustment of the shopping cart function. The biggest trouble he faced was to confront the consumers. As a designer you should understand this difficult--many times the user feedback information and the reason for the slot is often let people unprepared and cry. Female consumers think that shopping carts are too much like baby carriages, and they don't want to repeat "take their children's day" in supermarkets.

The male consumer's view is different from that of women, who argue that a cart with a delicate wheel can not show a male "strong arm" like a heavy shopping basket. So in the early 20th century to design a shopping cart actually need to consider to join the "manly"!? As a result, those who really like the shopping cart design seem to be left with less physically fit people and children who often sit in the shopping cart. It's not good.

So, how does Sylvan solve this problem? His thinking is not just to cater to, but to "create demand." Sylvan hired clients of different ages to pretend to go to supermarkets and grocery stores and use new shopping carts. The user's perception of new things is often random and subjective, so why not reinvent that perception? These disguised shopping cart users in the store frequent "walk show", so that the push shopping cart shopping no longer appear awkward and out of place, but let this behavior gradually become popular, and eventually form a scale.

Is it immoral to influence or attract targeted users to accept new products or information in this way? When a group of friends go out to dinner, a minority obeys the majority of the situation is not uncommon, the mutual influence of socialization is ubiquitous. In fact, enterprises, brand marketing is also in such a way to affect users.

With social media, brand marketing, you can make a product's influence by geometric progression, as a designer, should be at the right time to borrow media, public opinion and marketing. When your ideas are combined with appropriate public opinion, the value and profit you create will be considerable.

　　Never Stop the Innovation

The folding basket cart is sylvan, the original shopping cart prototype that he and his colleagues originally launched, and also the original version. After more than 10 years of marketing, the new nest-style shopping cart was born. The features of this shopping cart are similar to those of today's shopping carts, where multiple shopping carts can be stacked with each other.

After years of evolution, the design of folding shopping carts is becoming more and more perfect. Today's shopping carts are more than just folding, stacking, and keeping children seated safely, and the bottom layer allows you to easily place heavy weights, increase security locks against theft, and so on. A variety of intimate details to make shopping more worry.

Sylvan Goldman, the designer who created the fetish for the shopping cart, died as early as 1984, but his brain hole gave inspiration and direction to countless later designers, and his pioneering legacy was also developed.

When you complete a product design for a customer, it does not mean that the relevant tests and research records are useless. If you adjust your product to a specific market or user base, you can even predict what work to be done in the future, how you can accumulate experience, and enrich a comprehensive database that will make the relevant products and products of the next generation more complete and faster.

　Conclusion

As with many excellent products, the birth of the shopping cart is twists, but because the designers continue to improve, adjust, combined with user and market changes and actively guide user behavior, creating today almost no alternative to the supermarket shopping cart. The evolution of the entire shopping cart to the designers of the inspiration is virtually everywhere. First of all, the product nuanced changes and adjustments, and then the user feedback of the sober understanding and nuanced analysis and adjustment, active marketing and promotion strategy, and then to the customer, the end user's precise positioning and direction of accurate grasp, all of this created an excellent design, Its enduring vitality and extensive influence prove the irreplaceable value of a designer.