The Challange
Introducing new products and services based on customers’ needs and desires.
The Outcome
Identifying customers’ needs and desires for the brand through the design process and product usage experience.
In the realm of design, defining the design team’s approach and conducting research at the beginning of a project are crucial aspects. Choosing the right process and techniques for the entire project holds significant importance. In our current project, the MAKH team embarked on a journey with customers, employing the “Empathy” stage as part of the design thinking process. During this phase, the priority is understanding the customers and their experiences with the brand’s products and services. Being aware of customers’ desires, needs, problems, and aspirations can effectively guide the design and research, and development team in the right direction.
In this project, the empathy process was employed for Farazin’s office furniture as part of the research and development phase.
Quantitative Questionnaire
Based on the segmentation of target personas extracted from the brand’s CRM system, a concise quantitative questionnaire was designed to gather online responses from the audience within a short timeframe. Designing effective questionnaires, which often pose a significant challenge for research and development teams, required certain considerations.
First and foremost, the questions needed to avoid biasing the respondents or directly revealing our own desires within the questions. Instead, the questions should lead to responses that enable accurate analysis in the subsequent stage. Indirectly related questions were intertwined to ensure coherence and facilitate a more insightful analysis. Comparing the available options for each question would also provide a more precise analytical framework, making these technical aspects crucial.
However, the questionnaire needed to encompass the entire customer-brand interaction process. Employing affinity mapping techniques, tables were defined to organize the questions within them. This method would facilitate easy categorization and analysis of the received responses. The titles of affinity mapping tables were based on the product development process, sales and services process, as well as design and composition.
By using this approach, we ensured that no aspect of the research team’s agenda was left unexplored. The questionnaire was distributed online to the brand’s audience, taking into account the segmentation of target personas. The response time and the design of multiple-choice questions were also important factors to consider in the questionnaire design process.
Deep Interview
Including all the questions within a quantitative questionnaire is not always feasible. Many questions require detailed explanations and in-depth responses from the audience. Therefore, the complementary part of the online questionnaire is the deep interview with the user. It is a profound conversation where the audience discusses their needs and issues while using the product. The design of qualitative questionnaires in this section is based on the important sections and processes outlined in the affinity map.
The questions in this section should be conducted face-to-face with the customer. Managing the questions in a way that does not lead the audience in a particular direction or elicit desired answers is of paramount importance. In this conversation, valuable insights can be gained that were not anticipated beforehand, or even questions that were not initially designed in this area can be prompted by the user’s explanations. Therefore, it is essential to allow the audience to freely express their opinions and perspectives.
The management of questions, responses, and time during the interview is crucial as too many questions can overwhelm the audience and cause fatigue.
Observing User During Product Usage
The third stage in the empathy process involves observing and witnessing the user’s interaction with the product. It is possible that in the previous two phases, through quantitative and qualitative questionnaires, the user might not have expressed certain issues or needs, or they might have accepted the existing problems and shortcomings of the product as an inherent part of the process. Therefore, direct observation of the product’s usage provides valuable insights to the research team, enabling them to uncover any hidden issues and weaknesses in the product.
Often, users may become accustomed to certain problems over time due to prolonged usage of the product. It becomes the research team’s responsibility to record these issues and document them through photography and videography of the user during product usage. This documentation serves as valuable evidence during the analysis process to better understand and address the identified problems.
Often, users may become accustomed to certain problems over time due to prolonged usage of the product.
Conclusion
Empathy is a process where the research team puts themselves in the shoes of the customer, observing the usage of the product or service from their perspective. They strive to understand the user’s problems and receive their needs and desires.
The user’s aspirations and challenges become the guiding light for the design team, using them to solve problems and create new products or services. The new product is designed to create a fresh experience in the realm of office design. Nowadays, new jobs bring along new experiences, and office furniture must align with these novel experiences. Design, in pursuit of crafting a new experience, offers innovative solutions.
For visiting our client website please click on the link. FARAZIN