Design Management Group

Users and Customers

Users and customers should be involved throughout product development, from supporting the generation of ideas for future products through to the evaluation of production ready prototypes.

Capturing user requirements

The most critical stage for user involvement is during product definition. It is useful to consider this as a process to focus attention on who interacts with users, how information is gathered, interpreted, organised and communicated. This process includes the following stages:

1) Establish team

Gaining customer insights is not the sole responsibility of marketing or sales. Staff from across the business (sales, engineering, industrial design, production etc) should be involved in user focused research. Each team representative will see different things. The engineer may pick up on technical details, the industrial designer may notice particular ways of working and the marketer may focus on competitive threats. A cross-functional focus can help to build teamwork and generate consensus on the critical product attributes but most importantly enables insights to be generated from different perspectives.

2) Identify stakeholders

A stakeholder is any individual (either internal or external to the company) who is influenced by or has an influence on the design, development, production, distribution or use of a product. It is essential to formally consider who the stakeholders are in order to priorities user, customer and stakeholder research. One specific group of stakeholders of interest is the Lead User. These users tend to face needs that will be in the market place, months or years in advance of other users. They are often dissatisfied with existing solutions and have often tried to modify them to solve their own problems. They are of special interest because then will be keen to invest time (and sometimes money) in the search for a solution to their problems.

3) Plan data collection

It is useful to plan the data collection before embarking on user research. Who will be asked, how many meetings, and who will be involved in them. A simple planning matrix is a useful way of structuring the process and agreeing before hand on the people to be involved.

4) Gather data

There are many ways of gathering data on user needs, wants and perceptions. These range from highly structured approaches such as questionnaires and prepared interviews, through to 'ethnographic' methods such as user observation. A brief summary of some of the more common approaches is provided in the table below:

Having collected data in the form of completed questionnaires, transcribed interviews, written notes from observations, video footage, still photos or tape recordings, it is necessary to translate this raw data into 'customer needs'. It is possible that a range of methods of data collection have been used to gain different insights. All useful observations should be recorded as a single statement and from the raw statement a user need should be interpreted. Some examples are given below:

6) Organise, rank, communicate & reflect

If the responses from all customers are translated into 'interpreted needs' then there should be a fair degree of overlap and repetition. Thus, it is useful to compile a single report, grouping where practical similar responses. An aim is to arrive at a single report of interpreted needs, where each need is ranked for perceived importance.

No process is complete unless the results are communicated amongst the team. It is equally important to reflect on the success of the process in order to make improvements for next time - were the right stakeholders involved, were the right staff involved, did we gather the right data, did we use appropriate methods, did we plan the process well?

Further information

• Barabba V P, Zaltman G, (1991), Hearing the voice of the market: competitive advantage through creative use of market information, Harvard Business School Press, USA
• Cagan J, Vogel C M, (2002), Creating breakthrough products: innovation from product planning to product approval, Prentice Hall, USA
• Jordan P W, (2000), Designing pleasurable products: an introduction to the new human factors, Taylor & Francis, London
• Hague P, (1992), The industrial market research handbook 3rd edition, Kogan Page, UK
• Ulrich & Eppinger, (2000), Product design and development, McGraw Hill, USA