In many cases, you will have very clear ideas about what your customers want.  You have been supplying them with products and services that have been satisfying their needs for years. 

In simple cases this might be enough to guide the design and commercialisation of a successful product but there are boundless examples of paradigm shifts that change industries and affect the participants in unsettling ways.  This change is naturally driven by innovation and how you satisfy your customer’s needs is a critical component to your innovation processes.

At Bayly, we encourage you to continue to discover and uncover insights into your customer’s behaviour, psychology and needs.

Engage with your customers

You engage with your customers all the time, every time the phone rings with a new order, when they ring with questions; when you read a bad review.  You organisation has been designed to process these inputs with a consistent level of quality in a reactive mode.

Engaging with your customers to uncover insights into their behaviour, psychology and latent needs is a totally different process and involves applying proven design research techniques including;

• Field research
• Ethnographic studies
• Usability testing
• Human factors analysis
• User task modelling
• Global user research

Plan to stand out from your competitors

Everybody wants to stand out from their competition, but rather than achieving this by gut feel and good luck, we like to work with you to define your products around the qualities that will resonate with your customers.

We work with you to employ techniques that focus on understanding your market dynamics, your competition and the translation of your company’s principles in combination with your customer’s insights and their needs into product and service strategies that are focused on increasing the value of your business.

The types of activities that we employ in developing effective strategies and plans include; 

• Heuristic evaluation
• Competitive assessment
• Product roadmap development
• Persona creation
• Business case development
• Customer scenario development
• Business goal alignment
• Product strategy
• Multi-channel experience strategy
• Touchpoint integration
• Brand experience strategy

Research conducted by the PDMA in 2009 into how companies engage customers in product development verified the popular notions that companies are involving customers in the new product development process, and by doing so increasing their success.

It found that companies around the World are engaging customers extensively in their new product development strategies:

• 77% of companies involve customers extensively in their product development.
• 49% of companies work with their customers to identify gaps in customer realities and to identify customer's latent needs.

Design Research is Not Market Research

Design research, or user research, is very different to market research. Market Research is based on a ‘push’ to customers rather than a ‘pull’ from them. Once you have a volume of data from market research the key is what you do with it. Interpretation and application of data are as important as its collection.

Whilst market research has its place, it does not allow insights into the world and experiences of the customer – insights that are vital to achieving breakthrough design, innovation and truly customer-focused products and services.Design research delivers knowledge that feeds the design process.

This knowledge is made up of:

• Careful planning and execution of appropriate research methods
• Thoughtful interpretation of findings geared towards capturing new insights, and,
• Informed recommendations that are presented for practical and immediate application to the design problem.