STBY has recently completed a design research project for an international communications company focusing on family oriented services.
Successful family oriented services can already be found in many industries, from banking to utilities. They are seen as a very effective way to satisfy and retain customers. While the family oriented concept has been widely used by marketeers and advertisers in the past, designers and strategists need a deeper understanding of the information flows, habits and motivations of individuals within a household – a very special context.
STBY helped one of our clients by designing and conducting a generative design research project intended to inform design & development teams with in-depth customer perspectives and how the new proposition might be integrated in their everyday familiar lives.
The method STBY followed consisted of in-depth interviews with consumers on location, documented with visual maps and illustrated with video clips. This way the client team members could immerse themselves in the customers’ everyday lives, and explore their ideas for new services in an opportunities workshop.The client team members participated in every stage of the research, joining us for fieldwork and analysis. The advantage of this open collaboration model is that it allows for effective co-generation of insights and opportunities that can be leveraged immediately by designers and strategists.
Besides investigating people’s motivations behind the use of communication tools in a familiar setting, we also took an in-depth look into how family members already live with other services that support their household. How do people in a family manage and communicate the use of utilities, personal allowances and collective tasks that need to be done around the house? Even though these services bear no direct resemblance to a communications’ solution, they serve people in the same context – within a family. In order four our client to bring to market a successful communications’ innovation, it was crucial that this wider context was captured in all its complexity and harnessed in analytical structures.
It is this mix of creative, structured and holistic approaches that makes design research useful for designers and strategists bringing to market products that do not yet exist.
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