Product Design for Customer Needs

Famous user experience guru Mark Husrt told a story in the recent Forum on East and West - Cross-border and Convergence. In the summer of 1989, an ad agency in South Africa, Trevor Field, discovered by chance that the concept of a children's toy device that combines a merry-go-round with a suction pump. Using a principle similar to a windmill, this device draws groundwater away while children are happy to play, eliminating the need for a time-consuming and labor-intensive compression pump for Africa's vast areas lacking clean drinking water That said it seems like a wonderful opportunity.

Playpump pump system came into being in 10 years, began to install in some parts of South Africa since 1997. Its benefits seem obvious: bringing joy to children, bringing free and clean drinking water to locals, liberating girls who used to spend a lot of time flooding water far away from school on a daily basis, At the same time, the local economy is promoted through the localization of relevant industrial processes in the pump system. The project received wide acclaim from public opinion. In 2006, it gained more than $ 15 million in investments from various foundations and then rapidly expanded to countries such as Mozambique, Tanzania and Malawi.

The reality is that people do not see the children playing with excitement, instead they find the local women and children struggling to use the Playpump to take water, and in many places even cause severe drinking difficulties due to prolonged pump damage and unmanned maintenance. Locals generally hope to be able to use the old pump back, the program in the end what went wrong?

Playpump's core issue - lack of effective user involvement

In 2010, two Canadian volunteers conducted a field test of the device in Malawi. The results showed that pumping a bucket of water, Playpump takes 3 minutes and 7 seconds, while the local traditional water pump it? It only takes 28 seconds. A report from the Guadian also points out that children who want to meet the daily water needs of 2,500 people who want to meet the design need to spend "27" hours a day. For the people in the water-scarce regions, what they are most concerned about is how to get the most convenient access to drinking water. Plainly, Playpump is unaware of this problem. The entertaining of this device is clearly beyond its practicality. Not to mention that for most water-scarce regions, there is not enough groundwater available locally for Playpump extraction.

How to grasp the product has a serious flaw on the demand is widely used? A local grudge explains everything: "Before Playpump was installed, no one came to ask us for our advice, and we did not have a chance to choose the type of pump to install." The Playpump was installed by a group of Western volunteer teams Of the fleet into the village mighty, villagers in the surprise, the old pump dismantled replaced Playpump, before explaining to the villagers what the benefits of this device.

Of course, it would not be plausible to say that Playpump did not accept user needs at all. As its promotional video shows, when the device was first used in South Africa, local children are scrambling to play, and adults seem happy to get the water too. The fact is that when the camera is switched off, the children quickly disperse from the Playpump and the really hard-to-get women are still suffering. For the device's promoter, they saw what they wanted to see: Playpump was very popular with the locals, but did not realize that this user feedback was invalid and not really needed.

Product design and user needs

The essence of innovation is constantly trying new things and dealing with their possible risks.

- Jean Case, CEO of Playpump Support Foundation, The Case Foundation

However, in constant attempts, there is no doubt that there should be a more optimized product strategy, rather than unilateral take for granted, for innovation and innovation.

Product design path

How to achieve a new product innovation? Is the developer-led and full implementation, to be introduced after the user feedback; Or in the product early stages of the decision-making to mobilize users and continue to absorb user feedback? Mark Hurst believes that the latter should be the Playpump setback is a good case. When product decisions affect users, you need to incorporate their needs into the decision-making phase, and true innovation can only be found in the user's needs.

Farah Park in New York City was once a crime-ridden and harsh environment, which was a dangerous place for citizens. The New York government has tried to transform here by unilaterally improving the environment and strengthening supervision. However, it often fails . Later, through a survey of local citizens, it was found that the only positive activity in the park was the dog walking behavior of some citizens. Park managers adopted an experimental program to improve the quality of the lawn in the park and to remove the requirement that people walk their dogs in parks with dog leashes. This small measure has had a very positive effect and the popularity of the park has rapidly risen , The environment began to slowly improve, the crime rate began to slowly decline. The mere significant positive effect of just meeting such a small demand for citizenship undoubtedly deserves to be referred to by product designers.

How to grasp the user needs

An excellent product designer must be a keen observer who needs to know more about the real needs of the target user at home, at work, on the road, and other usage scenarios.

With an open mind to observe the behavior of users, without subjective prejudices; explore the user's core, unmet needs; product innovation and user needs to agree

In addition, designers must have their own views, just as excited to use Playpump children in the lens, after all, the user's needs are sometimes not the real demand, and the product to discover the new needs of the user's case is not Rare, at this point Apple's products can be said to be an example.

Li Jianhua, director of strategy and research for Rococo Design Group, has a principle of "helping people and limiting people" for product design and user needs. She shared her company's experience in product design at the Critical Design for a Business Value Reader.

A product case Rococo has been involved with is a study of user needs for supermarket trolleys that join the information display. This new feature lets users see useful information such as product descriptions, discount information, and supermarket product layout when shopping for something that, in theory, can actually enhance a user's shopping experience, but in fact few people care about it. Rococo's user needs research using several practical methods.

1. "Predefined problems - observe user behavior - identify needs"

This approach first requires the designer to think of himself as a user, prescribing some of the problems from the experience of the end users who often use the product, and even making preliminary estimates of the causes of the problems. And then put these estimated problems into actual usage scenarios, observing and investigating user behaviors to verify these hypotheses and discovering new problems with expectation. Finally, sort out a product or a function through a series of observations Whether to meet the real needs of users, to determine a product by the user favorite or abandoned what is the core reason.

2. User Behavior Operation Slice Module

For the recorded user behavior, how should we do the analysis? Ordinary visual observation can reveal some problems, but may require more accurate analysis of the underlying psychological factors for a user's specific behavior. Another method of Rococo's research is to frame-by-frame the user's behavioral data (mainly video recording), and analyze the user's subtle behavior by mining the deep and internal requirements of the user's behavior.

For the supermarket trolley in this case, Rococo sliced ​​the video records of the supermarket trolley users for user behavior analysis for several consumption processes such as taking a car, putting a bag, browsing, picking up, checking out, and the like. The analysis shows that the design of the cart's handrail, the position and the size of the display screen, etc., have defects in the original design of the trolley and cause inconvenience to the user, so few people use it.

The final conclusion is that consumers think the trolley plus a display or trolley, the nature has not changed, so he will treat the ordinary trolley approach to this trolley. However, in fact, after adding the display, the positioning of the two has been different. In the original design, everyone, including customers (supermarkets), designers, was not aware of it, so the end product did not really help customers solve the problem. When the product for the user to help and limit the two can not achieve the desired balance, one can imagine the product must fail, or it does not help users to solve the actual problem.

As Mark Hurst puts it, good products are the game and trade-off between user needs and the designer's ideal design.

Source: http://www.geekpark.net/read/view/158805