Reveal Users' Latent Needs Through Contextual Co-Creation
What do they really want? Reveal users’ latent needs through contextual Co-Creation Martin Jentsch1, Sebastian Wendlandt1, Niels Clausen-Stuck1, & Gerhard Krämer2 1designaffairs GmbH, 2Siemens Healthcare GmbH Germany Abstract User research activities to gain insights about customers’ preferences and needs for new products or services are well known and often applied in early concept stages of the development process. Methods of Design Thinking such as Co-Creation or participatory design are well established. However, since users are not trained design professionals, the ideation and design sessions often end up in an assembly of concept elements with low innovation impact, not balanced and not well curated. Behind these “Concept-Frankensteins”, the actual needs and perspectives of the users are hidden and need to be revealed. This paper presents how to tackle this challenge by combining re-enactments, interviews, observation and prototyping in Co-Creation sessions, shown on a Siemens Healthcare Diagnostic Imaging CT case study. It is explained how to gain broad and deep insights in early stages of the development process, e.g. by life-size mock-ups to create analogous, but openly creative settings with on the fly concept solutions and designs addressing the discussed ideas. The paper is naming recommendations of successful Co-Creation. It closes with a discussion of challenges and limitations of the approach. Introduction Collaborative approaches, often summarised as Design Thinking (Curedale, 2013), to develop products, services, experiences or strategies are widely applied in today’s development processes. This includes human centred conception of consumer products (Jentsch, 2007), mobility services (Dettmann et al., 2013), user interfaces for software applications (Dettmann & Bullinger, 2014), advanced driver assistance systems (Simon et al., 2014) or medical devices (Mühlstedt & Helmreich, 2014) to name just a few examples.
[Show full text]