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Our observations of the world around us

• How Aspirations Fuel Innovation by Chris Rockwell on April 09, 2008

  Customers are your biggest assets — if you let them express themselves. People experience a product not just with the usual five senses, but with a sixth: emotion.

  True innovation comes from digging deeper than the typical focus groups and ethnography studies. You need to see beyond the current experience into the consumer’s aspirations. Increasingly, this kind of research insight is simply the cost of entry for many businesses.

  If research ends with merely watching how customers interact with products and situations, you’ve short-changed the value you can tap from them. We use participatory methodologies to involve customers in a way that reveals their aspiration — what they wish for. When they start to think about how it ought to be, they become a source of tangible inspiration for innovation.

  By putting people in the center of the design process, through early research and into the completed product or service, it helps ensure their experience will exceed their expectations.

  Emotions and aspirations? Check. Now what?
  We find that research into user experience provides lots of insight, but communicating that insight in a way that empowers a design team can be a challenge. Research outcomes need to be actionable, meaningful, and descriptive of the design opportunity. You can’t explain a design problem in the form of a solution. The communication challenge increases when the team that needs to act on the findings includes many disciplines.

  We find that we can help in translating the insights by communicating them in an inspirational manner. For example, if customers want durability and light weight, we show the team design metaphors that exhibit these qualities in the customer’s terms. This approach provides a framework to focus innovation.

  We also help clients align around insight and not lose buy-in as they proceed to develop the product or service. This consensus building is a key piece of the puzzle.
  

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