People-Centred Design Trip yields Innovation Advice

"Innovation through People-Centred Design: Lessons for the UK" was the culmination of the DTI Global Watch Mission that took a group of UK design researchers and practitioners to the States to investigate uptake of UCD. In all, 10 people went to the US for a week and interviewed 30 companies in several states, including Microsoft, BMW and Adaptive Path. The relentlessness of the schedule was something that only peeked out between the words of the many people who contributed to the presentations at the Design Council that launched the group's report.

Nina Wakeford, director of INCITE at the University of Surrey and delegation leader, and Sarah Turner, an international technology promoter for the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), introduced the evening, attended by many in the design community. 'The communication of academic research should itself be seen as a design challenge,' concluded Wakeford, the only academic in the party. And the theme of communication within companies and between departments was taken up both formally and informally by others. A key finding was the degree to which UCD professionals had made themselves listened to and the impact that has had for the companies in terms of design decisions. Ellie Runcie of the Design Council, herself a delegate, talked of the competitive environment in which teams were rewarded for successful products and the way that incremental improvements had to be pitched on their merits and 'sold in' to the companies they visited.

One of the keynotes, from Intel, a participating company, was Herman D'Hooge, who talked about "Translating People Research into Innovative Products". He conceded that Intel was perhaps an unlikely choice to be addressing this subject, since, as he demonstrated in his analysis of the PC ecosystem, it was a company in charge of an internal component that end users never had to engage with and several steps away from the user interface.

Nevertheless, the nature of that ecosystem has convinced Intel that it needs to be innovating with PC OEMs (manufacturers) to open up new markets. The OEMs are not doing it because they are too risk averse, said D'Hooge, so user research from Intel is 'of mutual benefit for the industry'. As delegate Dan Hill of the BBC commented later, this is another case where ROI on research is hard to quantify since benefits are distributed broadly.

Intel's first foray into this world paid off handsomely with an award-winning PC aimed at the Chinese market that has sold well. Research showed that despite a child-centric culture with a great value put on education, Chinese parents were reluctant to buy PCs because they saw them as distractions – a way to avoid study through games, and so on. The PC that came out of these findings supports learning with special software and a tablet interface that can be used with a keyboard or directly for handwriting. The key feature is that it is lockable in such a way that only certain software and content can be used without the key. Nonetheless, once unlocked, it is a fully-functioning PC so that it is of use to parents as well.

D'Hooge said this new focus area of innovation driven by end user needs was only a corner of the company as yet, but would be rolled out. In describing its functioning, he stressed the need to avoid handoffs, but to have experts with user knowledge available throughout the design and development process to contribute.

Associated Link: the report is so far unavailable from the DTI site, which is linked below

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