Importance of user-centred design for product developers
As product developers, you want your products to be appealing, competitive and well designed to meet customer needs in order to sell well.  The degree of success depends on your design and development process which governs all aspects of product development such as product definition, engineering implementation, testing, manufacturing and shipment availability, as well as schedule, budget, decision and risk management.  The better your process and execution, the greater your chances of success.

In the past, companies focused on reliability to differentiate themselves.  Over time, this became less of a differentiator as competitors caught up with equally reliable products.  To stay ahead, companies started to differentiate based on features and functions.  Spurred by technological advances, many of these were purely technology-driven and implemented without much thought as to how useful or usable they were in actually helping users accomplish their tasks, with the result that as functionality grew, so did complexity of use.  Today, companies realize the next level of competitive differentiation is in the arena of industrial design aesthetics and product usability.

With many competitor products having similar functions and features, what sells today is customer perception at point-of-sale.  Products have just a few seconds or minutes of customer attention to sell themselves and make good first impressions.  When customers walk into a shop, they notice and are attracted to good looking products.  Unattractive products do not get picked up and explored even when they may have the best functions and features, losing opportunities for sales.   On the other hand, attractive products get noticed, picked up and explored, which means they now have a good opportunity to sell their functions and features if customers can figure out how to access and use them.  Products that feel good in the hand and are easy to use allow users to explore their features and functions.  Those that are uncomfortable and difficult to use hinder customers from accessing and discovering their features and functions, creating negative first impressions.

Good looking products invite customers to explore.  Good usability facilitates exploration of a product's features and functions and creates positive first impressions that help to sell the product.

User-centred design services for product developers
Regardless of whether you are an OEM/ODM or you have your own design team developing your own products, to play the game competitively at this level requires a user-centred product development process that addresses customer experiences in terms of aesthetics, ergonomics, innovation, operability and usability.  We can help you to develop such a process or advise how you can modify your existing design processes to become user-centred.  We will help you to incorporate user-centred design activities including product conceptualization, analysis, review and testing, throughout your project phases from project initiation, investigation, lab & engineering prototypes right through to manufacturing release. 

If you are an OEM/ODM designing products for other companies, you can use our expertise to improve your design and offer more competitive products to your prospective clients.

We can help you to analyze user, task and contextual requirements to develop user-centred features, functions and user interface specifications for the product.  This is especially useful if you are in new and emerging product categories playing in early-adopter markets where you are seeking to provide market leading innovative design concepts, ideas and features.

If you are playing in a well-established, mature product category, we can help you to do usability competitive analysis to understand competitor strengths and weaknesses, identify industry best practices and establish 'best-in-class' design goals for your product.

By involving us early in your development, we can help you to identify user and task needs that are used to establish parameters for selection of suitable components used in external user interfaces such as displays and controls.  We can help you to assess and evaluate different component vendor offerings such as display readability, force-displacement characteristics for tactile switches and ergonomics of different controllers & switches.  By involving us late in the development when these components have already been selected may mean that some usability improvements cannot be accommodated.

We can provide design reviews and perform usability tests on product mock-ups and prototypes in order to identify usability problems and recommend solutions.  In the course of development, your engineers may have various alternative design implementations which we can help to review.  This allows your designers to select the most appropriate implementation to satisfy usability design objectives.

We can review not just the product itself, but the total solution including the design of accessories, learning products (user guides, manuals, setup posters etc.), software setup and installation, online web-based utilities as well as packaging to provide a good out-of-box (OOB) experience.  User-centred design looks at the product offering in totality and seeks to deliver a positive customer experience in every area that users interact with.

The key to successful user-centred design is early involvement in order to provide sufficient opportunity for design changes and improvements.  As the development progresses, this window of opportunity shrinks until the design is frozen, after which any recommendations for change can only go into future follow-on products.

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