For most design engineers, the public answer is most likely "yes." The reality, though, may be a little more nuanced than that. Customers can’t tell you how to innovate. Often, they have trouble expressing their needs. They could never have told Steve Jobs years in advance that they needed user interfaces like those that eventually appeared on the iPhone or iPad.
"Customers don’t solve problems," noted George Land, founding partner of a strategic innovation company called the Farsight Group, during a recent interview with Design News. "They merely identify their needs. They don’t have any idea how to solve your [design] problems."
Still, customer innovation is a critical part of the design process, and experts are increasingly citing its importance in good design. Take, for example, the new Cadillac CUE, an automotive center console that you’ll hear more about in an upcoming issue of Design News. During the design of the CUE, 40 Cadillac engineers and designers rode with more than 120 potential customers to learn how center consoles are used. They rode home with them from the dealerships when they picked up their cars. They traveled with them on sales calls. They sat in the backseats with their kids and dogs. They even joined them while they were on vacation.
To develop Cadillac CUE, 40 GM engineers and designers rode with more than 120 customers. (Photo courtesy of Cadillac)
For Cadillac, the idea was to understand their customers’ needs and frustrations. The company’s engineers didn’t simply want to take the usual design approach -- which was to examine competitors’ trends, put together a rough concept, and hand it off to the graphics design team to make it look pretty. They wanted to build their new product from the ground up, based on feedback from customers.
That might seem like a sensible, and maybe even obvious, way to design a new product. Often, however, that’s not the way it’s done. During CUE’s development, many GM executives wondered aloud about the wisdom of investing in such an expensive design process (GM was nearing bankruptcy at the time). Some asked, “You want to do what? You want to ride along with people?”
In truth, there are often good reasons for not taking the kind of deep dive exemplified by Cadillac’s CUE. Such efforts may be time-consuming. They may be expensive. And -- this may be the most important reason -- no one can guarantee they will work.
But Land argues that customer feedback can have tremendous value, given the proper approach. He advocates training the customers, as well as the design engineers, to ensure that the feedback is worthwhile. He cites an example of the automotive electronics giant, Delphi Corp., which "trained customers in creative thinking and then stimulated them to get as wild and dreamy as possible," in an effort to design a better electronic control system. Land said that Delphi questioned six customer groups -- each numbering about 20 people -- and then followed those sessions with a process called "deep needs analysis."
Cadillac (which did not work with Land) used a similar process. After spending hundreds of hours with customers, engineers and designers wrote their observations on sticky notes and placed them on a conference room wall. Team members then "walked the wall" and scribbled their thoughts on a pie chart that rated users from young to old and tech-savvy to tech-averse. Only after all that analysis did the team start to get a better handle on what features their new product should have.
Based on the customer feedback and ensuing analysis, Cadillac’s team decided to use forward-looking technologies, such as a capacitive touch screen, haptic feedback, and proximity sensing. In retrospect, the technologies now seem obvious, but at the time (the iPhone hadn’t even reached the market when GM engineers made their decisions), the choices seemed daring. Whether those choices will resonate with consumers is still unknown, since CUE won’t reach the market until 2012.
The key to success in such endeavors is to attack design problems from fresh perspectives, Land said. "The problem is that we all build a bunch of assumptions that lock us into a way of thinking," he told us. "Getting out of that requires people who don’t know anything about the problem and can bring new viewpoints."
As one who also values my vacations, Tool_maker, I thought you might want to know that the Cadillac engineers vacationed with families for hours, not days and nights. Even in this era -- luckily -- there are limits to what engineers can be expected to do.
Alex: In answer to your question about why engineers in consumer electronics don't experiment more, I can only assume it's because someone upstairs sees it as a mater of money. Cadillac engineers said that GM executives were appalled when they heard what they were doing. Their concern was cost. A commonly-held management viewpoint is that engineers need to keep their productivity up, which can only be accomplished by keeping their heads down.
I do agree with you to some extent. Even though industries are different there are many aspects. Vacationing with customers will not work in the case of a medical device. In this case may be we have to work with the customer. But yes your comment are really thought provoking .
The difference, though, is the industry. In the later years, Jobs had name recognition, a big following, and money. If his disruptive design (such as iPod) failed, so be it. In the early years, Jobs was all about the risk and Apple could very well have turned into a company nobody would even know any more. In this case, it's an existing auto company that doesn't have that level of risk tolerance, so they need to aim more at what the customers actually do want.
(Unless, of course, they just put the new designs into the "package" that includes the engine and tire....)
Steve jobs has shown the successful way and he did not much care about customer's inputs to design. What matter is the engineering sense to think and outthink customer in turn to surprse the him. If the engineer waited for the customer to help then disruptive innovations would not have taken place. What we need is Jules verne engineers. But yes design engineer must think for customers ...!
That's an intriguing question, Alex. Having spent some time on the dark side, aka marketing, I believer the answer lies there, instead of in the world of design. It's a combination of time to market and unit cost/profit margin. The lower the unit cost of the product--consumer electronics relatively low, cars relatively high--the higher the profit margin must be, so the less time is spent on anything not considered essential. In a separate track, the shorter the time to market, the same thing goes. Combined, you get lots of consumer electronics that some of us feel should have been designed a lot better.
The other angle we're not factoring in is what can loosely be called the rise time of the product development cycle. So for example, with automakers, they have to be very careful about what customer comments they factor into their designs, because they (the automakers) have lengthy and costly development cycles. More importantly, they can't easily change stuff at the end once the product is out in the marketplace if the idea/implementation turns out to be a bad one. At the other end of the spectrum are PC and smartphone makers, which have 6-month product lifecycles and are thus free to experiment. Which kind of begs they question, why don't they experiment more than they actually do (which is not much)?
To me and my family vacations are precious times, careflly planned and generally both restful and memorable. So when I read the title of this article my first tought was, "Oh no. Now someone is trying to make me feel guilty for wanting some downtime away from work." That ain't gonna happen.
But to get first hand customer feedback in unguarded moments is a great idea. I often wonder how opinion polls would vary if the participants were unaware of the fact that they were participating in an opinion poll. That is what is being constructed here. The methodology described is unadaptable to my field, so I can easily tell everyone else to go for it, knowing I will never have to. However, we do get customer feedback and it is usually reflected in repeat business or lack of the same.
Alex, I'm not sure people don't care about the warning, safety, and preventive stuff built into vehicles, I think it's more that the vast majority don't want to know all the particulars. They make an assumption that given the big bucks they are shelling out for modern vehicles, that under the covers there is plenty of hidden technology that will ensure their safety when driving. It's more of a given compared with those infotainment and performance features that can get the average lay person more excited and engaged with their car.
One way not mentioned yet, that I can recall, is asking customers about what they don't like in a product. Of course this means that there must be product in the customers hands already. The "focus group" method is not even close, since it is primarily a tool used by marketing weasels to steer things around to match their own point of view.
In my particular line of business it has always been vital to know just exactly what my customers needed, because all sales were based on the product solving some problem for the customer. Occasionally it wound up that the customer was asking for something that would not solve their problem, although they were assuming that it would. Those times usually wound up building customer confidence when the final product solved their problem. OF course, the difference there is that I could be close to my customers, not separated by multiple distribution levels. Also, they were closely associated with their processes that they usually had a rational understanding when we discussed the product solutions.
Auto companies seem to not always be aware that some folks keep a vehicle for more than six months, and that product defficiencies that could be accptable in a one-day rental would be deal breakers when attemting to sell a product that will be held for several years. My guess is that all of the automakers decided to make this change at the same time so that they could point out that "everybody does it that way now."
With LEDs dropping in price virtually every year, automakers have begun employing them, not only on luxury vehicles, but on entry-level models, as well.
Using almost 200 light-emitting diodes in the front and back of the new 2014 CTS, Cadillac designers are showing how LEDs can change the character of a vehicle.
We recently posted an online slideshow called, “18 People You Didn’t Know Were Engineers.” Within hours of its publication, readers began to suggest names of other luminaries -- astronauts, politicians, athletes and actors -- who were educated or had worked as engineers.
In yet another sign that hydrogen is creeping into the consciousness of global automotive designers, sports car maker Aston Martin plans to run a hydrogen-fueled vehicle in a 24-hour Grand Touring race later this month.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 3
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
A quick look into the merger of two powerhouse 3D printing OEMs and the new leader in rapid prototyping solutions, Stratasys. The industrial revolution is now led by 3D printing and engineers are given the opportunity to fully maximize their design capabilities, reduce their time-to-market and functionally test prototypes cheaper, faster and easier. Bruce Bradshaw, Director of Marketing in North America, will explore the large product offering and variety of materials that will help CAD designers articulate their product design with actual, physical prototypes. This broadcast will dive deep into technical information including application specific stories from real world customers and their experiences with 3D printing. 3D Printing is
To save this item to your list of favorite Design News content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
If you found this interesting or useful, please use the links to the services below to share it with other readers. You will need a free account with each service to share an item via that service.
Tweet This
4 
