INSPIRED BY WOMEN

Creating business with people-driven innovation

A design-people casebook

02 — inspired by women

WELCOME

In 2012, design-people wrapped up a 3-year research project that involved 1500 women – and a few men – from around the world. The goal of the project had been to develop recipes for female-responsive innovation and marketing.

The project findings and guidelines are de-scribed in Guidebook to a Female Interaction Strategy.

Since then, design-people has worked inten-sively to implement the innovation know-how and skills we gained in collaboration with clients. By applying our expertise in female values and preferences to user experience, innovation, design and marketing, we have created a substantial business impact for our clients.

In this casebook, we have highlighted the results of our work with six different clients – showing how our approach has improved their branding, user experiences and sales.

For more cases and the background of our team and services, visit design-people.dk. Meanwhile, may the material here inspire you!

USER RESEARCH & CLIENT REFERENCES

User research Client references

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01DEVELOPING A SUCCESSFUL NEW LUXURY BRAND – INSPIRED BY WOMENVifa

“In all my time in the design industry, I’ve never seen such a tremendous response to a new product. Social media, web forums and the blogosphere have embraced us, and we’ve been getting inquiries from around the world – it’s been just stunning.” —Lena Hansen, Marketing Director, Vifa When Vifa unveiled their new Copenhagen wireless speaker, it was not at a consumer electronics show but at the Stockholm Furniture Fair. Why?

Because the launch reflected a process that rebrands the au-dio component manufacturer as an exclusive lifestyle brand that embraces female preferences and business potential. Vifa’s branding strategy, marketing materials and prod-uct design were developed in close collaboration with design-people. The Copenhagen embodies several key ingredients of a holistic female user experience design – design-people’s specialty. The speaker has already received a prestigious iF Design Award. But the real payoff has been the enthusiasm of the female target group for the new speakers – and for the Vifa brand. “A speaker that’s actually beautiful! Scandinavian design, with an elegance that will fit in most homes. Created for the female segment – who ought to be seriously addressed anyway – but not so feminine that men won’t be able to live with it too.” —Designermor, Lifestyle blog

design-people key contributions 01 Female-driven branding strategy 02 Product design 03 Web design & communication

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02A FEMALE BENEFIT AND INNOVATION STRATEGYDanfoss

“I’m not surprised that the focus on benefits has helped us get it right for all users – including men. I’ve never met a man who said, ‘I don’t like this product because it’s too easy for me to operate.’ ” —Søren Hesseldahl, Innovation Director, Heating Solutions Division, Danfoss

Indoor climate products are developed mainly by male en-gineers. Their technical way of thinking has led to sophisti-cated products that don’t appeal to women.

Danfoss – a global leader in such products – knows this well, thanks to their work with design-people on the Female Interaction research project. They discovered that though women would like to control their indoor climates, their priorities tend to be different from men’s. For instance, women place a higher value on health and social well-being.

While we had created award-winning designs for Danfoss in the past, Danfoss now asked for our help in making their innovation culture and practices embrace female values. This facilitated a change in their innovation practices. Today, Danfoss employs gender know-how to obtain user insights and test new product concepts with women – be-fore technical implementation and design. Recent Danfoss heating products focus more on real-life user benefits and situational ease of use, utilizing a female benchmark to develop and promote the products successfully.

design-people key contributions 01 Female interaction strategy 02 User exploration, innovation & concept testing 03 Product & digital design

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03DEEPER USER UNDERSTANDING LEADS TO SUCCESSFUL PRODUCT RANGEPressalit

“design-people helped us better understand our users’ mo-tivations and barriers, and they used the insights to develop a user-friendly new product concept for our care division. This concept formed the foundation for our successful new Pressalit Care PLUS series.” —Michael Bruun, Business Devel-opment Director, Pressalit Pressalit, a global player in toilet seats and care products for the disabled, turned to design-people to understand what its users and their caregivers – who are primarily women – might want from a new bathroom product range. Based on extensive user research, we held user and concept workshops with the Pressalit development team. Improved use scenarios led to innovative future products which we visualized as full-scale concepts with substantial benefits, for example:

• Making adjustment far easier through visible and ergonomic handle design.

• Increasing user comfort by introducing a softer look and feel for surfaces in contact with the body.

design-people key contributions 01 User field studies 02 User scenarios & concept ideation 03 Product & interaction design concepts

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04FROM TECH PRODUCT TO WINNING BUSINESS STRATEGYE3light

“Three months later, our improved user experience and marketing approach were critical in opening the door to the US market. The Danish Trade Council just awarded us its Vitus Export Prize, and we expect to sell 500,000 Mylights this year.” —Flemming Viktor Andersen, Founder, E3light E3light, a startup specializing in environmentally friendly light sources, came to design-people with the Mylight, a LED flex strip triggered by a motion sensor – an intriguing new product that was selling poorly.

We posed several critical questions: Which real-life benefits does the mylight have – and for whom? And how might we persuade people to buy it? After suggesting a female benchmark user, design-people explored the entire product experience from her perspective and developed a new bene-fit story based on the most promising female use scenarios. We then created a packaging and communication concept that women could immediately relate to their own needs – such as when they had to comfort a child in the middle of the night.

“When we first brought Mylight to market, consumers were not clear what it was good for. design-people helped us to define a female lead user, and to frame and communicate a strong benefit story by translating the product specifica-tions into real user benefits that people could relate to.” —Flemming Viktor Andersen, Founder, E3light

design-people key contributions 01 Female user experience strategy 02 User exploration & concept testing 03 Packaging & communication

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05TWO DESIGN AWARDS – AND A BOOST IN SALESAirmaster

“design-people convinced us to begin with users instead of engineers. As a result, the Airlinq has won two iF awards, for product design and for interaction design. More im-portantly, the innovative panel is being embraced by our partners and clients – and by the people in front of the classroom.”—Lars Vestergaard, CEO, Airmaster

Airmaster’s engineering expertise was creating a hidden problem: people didn’t always use the control panels. As a rule, Airmaster would develop a new panel by asking its engineers which functions to include – and then place them all in a menu-based display.

Through workshops with female teachers, design-people found that complicated controls got in the way of women’s desire to manage their surroundings. This discouraged them from interacting with ventilation systems.

In response, design-people created Airlinq, a panel with one main control to increase or decrease airflow. Its simple appearance conceals a broad range of advanced functions available to supervisors and installers. This simple concept and elegant design proved ground-breaking in the industry, earning two design awards and greatly enhancing Airmaster’s reputation as a leader in innovation.

design-people key contributions 01 User exploration 02 Product & interaction concept 03 User testing

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06A NEW CELL PHONE EXPERIENCE FOR WELL-OFF WOMENVertu

“The result was even more successful than I had hoped. Not only did design-people give us new insights and tools for attracting female customers – they also made us realize that by addressing women, we can strengthen our appeal to men too.” —Hutch Hutchison, Head of Concept Creation and Design, Vertu

Vertu is a luxury cell phone brand based in England. As a tech company with a typical male bias, Vertu was con-cerned that it was excluding a crucial group of potential users: women. It asked design-people to help its design team develop a larger female customer base. Our Female Interaction experts met with wealthy women in half a dozen countries. We used the interview sessions to analyze the brand’s innovation potential from a female perspective. Then we worked with Vertu’s design team to identify innovation opportunities and ways to improve the purchase experience. Together we framed a new design approach to reflect the experience of prospective female users.

design-people key contributions 01 Female user exploration 02 Customer journey analysis 03 Female user experience innovation

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BEYOND GREAT DESIGN

At design-people, we begin many of our assignments by exploring aswers to the following question: How can we create value by connecting the potentials of your offerings to the needs and desires of your prospective users? The Female Interaction project has made it clear to us that the key to business success lies in connecting with people’s values and creating everyday benefits. Male and female preferences are often fundamentally different – and the emerging buying power of women makes it more important than ever to address women as customers and users.

As user-experience experts, we can help you strengthen your bottom line, based on deep user understanding, inno-vation and design. Our services can address your corporate user-experience strategy, the innovation of your offerings, and the design and communication of the products and services you bring to market.

As these case studies demonstrate, the payoff for our clients is considerable. Better user experiences, more meaningful customer relationships, brands that stand out from the competition – and stronger sales.

Contact us today, to learn how people-driven innovation can create more business for you.

—design-peopleVesterbro Torv 1–3, 3rd floor8000 Aarhus CDenmark—(+45) 7022 6462info@design-people.dk—design-people.dk

Vesterbro Torv 1–3, 3rd floor8000 Aarhus CDenmark—(+45) 70 22 64 62info@design-people.dk—design-people.dk