One of the things we do here at STBY is provide long-term support for the development of new services. This often means conducting several projects for the same client, using our expertise in design research to help them ensure that what they develop is always in-tune with the people they’re developing for.
The latest project we conducted for Telekom (T-Mobile and Deutsche Telekom) via their Creation Center is a great example of how this works. We’d previously worked with them to explore what new services people would like from their mobile phones. We designed a project in which people made their own video documentaries about what the parts of their social lives they wanted to share with their friends (you can read all about this one here). The end-result was a wealth of richly evocative research materials, around which Telekom could start developing new service concepts.
The latest project saw us again working together to ensure that concepts they were working on were properly aligned with the want and needs of the customers they were designing for. We put together a User Lab in which a range of different people examined some of Telekom’s latest service concepts. They gave us their thoughts on what worked, what didn’t, and what they really wanted when using the internet on their phone. The exercises we designed provided deep, insightful, and targeted feedback, which was subsequently analysed on Day 2 of the workshop.
This second day saw us working with a team drawn from several departments within Telekom to cluster and analyse the material that had been created. We identified those areas where the new concepts were both meeting and missing customer expectations, and also highlighted a number of ‘areas of opportunity’ where new directions could be incorporated. Matching the insights gathered against the service concept’s features in this manner provided it with the evidential foundation needed in order to move to the next stage of the development cycle.
We’ve now worked on several projects with the Creation Centre at Telekom, with the insights into people’s lives and routines that we generate serving to anchor their development around the people they’re developing for. Helping them incorporate design research into their development cycles ensures that the new concepts being developed are always in-tune with the world people will eventually be using them in.
If you’d like to learn more about this process, or have an informal chat about what these kinds of projects actually entail, simply drop Geke a line at geke@stby.eu.