Product Development Starts With Talking to Consumers
Product design and product development begin in stages. Some of these projects begin as ideas outside of a company, but a lot of them are initiated internally. Innovation inside the company starts with an idea that is further developed by research, which is conducted on a regular basis to create a type of road map toward design and development.
“Part of that research,” says Jean-Jacques L’Henaff, “involves ethnographic research and just talking to random people on the street and in the community. This is different from a focus group, which selects a set group of people to engage in a question and answer sort of research project.”
“It also doesn’t try to steer people in the direction of answering direct questions about things they like or want or even need,” L’Henaff continues. “Instead, ethnographic research of this sort engages them in a discussion and then observes the person’s reactions to gauge unmet needs. We are looking for points of friction and coping mechanisms too. That is because people don’t even realize most of the time that when there is a point of friction, they find a coping mechanism to get around it. That is why it is so important to observe people and decipher what people are telling you in order to understand where the true issue is.”
Product design education, and particularly online product design education, uses these approaches a lot. Once you get what the true issue at hand is, you can take all this data and all of this quantitative information and turn it into valuable insight. Then, you decide if this valuable insight is worth focusing on and whether or not it’s worth turning into a project. Maybe it isn’t a separate project unto itself, but it becomes part of a project that’s already in the works. That’s a pretty common practice too.
