Product Design Portfolio — Some Samples of Our Work

Experience | Specialties | Portfolio

Perceived Quality

When a major manufacturer came to us seeking a stronger understanding of their customers’ standards and perceptions of quality, we designed a methodology that showed how these customers developed these perceptions through the senses of sight, touch and sound.

Evaluating both our client’s products as well as competitors’, and applying a mix of skilled observation and metric evaluation, we were able to uncover relationships between specific design elements, customers’ sensory impressions of those elements and overall quality perceptions. Our client used this learning to drive a major product redesign to better meet customer needs.

Product Innovation

The Global Product Development Group of a client had identified the need to identify, define and design the next generation of products for its customer base. They needed to uncover and define new technologies and products innovations to drive business strategies for 2007, 2008, 2009.

While ideation was an ongoing activity for this client, past experience had shown that delegation of this activity to junior-level employees and managers was most likely to generate “small” ideas or incremental product improvements. There was a need for engaging senior-level decision makers (Directors and VPs) in the process to get the big ideas and major platform breakthroughs. Furthermore, there was a desire, driven by a concern that internal participants needed a “real world” perspective, to make end-user customers active participants in the idea creation process.

With all of this in mind, we designed an immersive, two-day program of customer focus groups, salesperson focus groups, customer interaction and facilitated ideation workshops.

Each day began with a facilitated team meeting to process information or review, as appropriate, the previous days’ activities and learning. Then followed a mid-morning Voice-of-the-Customer focus group among participants recruited from among that day’s assigned brand platform segments. Following the formal focus group, two to three group participants were invited to an afternoon, facilitated ideation workshop with the GPD team. Finally, the customers were dismissed and the Marketing Partners and GPD teams continued rating and ranking ideas, and planning for the next day’s activities.

Over the two-day session, nearly 300 new product feature, platform and service ideas were generated for the next generation product.

Packaging and Product Design

One of our food clients needed a rapid turn-around to meet a launch deadline. With a major capital investment on the line, and pressures to make the investment decision, we turned to online methods to quickly provide a nationwide sample of consumers to evaluate the product concept and packaging alternatives. We were able to recruit participants for online focus groups, conduct the groups, mail products to interested participants to try at home and conduct follow-up interviews all within about four weeks.

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