With User Interface Design from Socio-Cultural Trend to a Innovative Office Phone Generation

Abstract

At the beginning of each new product strategy there is a complex bunch of needs and requirements. designafairs consults socio-cultural trend research to get the needs of future users to focus all the requirements. In initialization workshops scenarios are created together with the customer. These scenarios reflect respectively single socio-cultural trends in form of narrative stories, which describe a detailed product environment. This serves as an extensive briefing for the interdisciplinary design team: Industrial, interface, color and material designers, anthropologists, psychologists and engineers. Different product concepts are developed and verified qualifiedly by different methods of testing. The top resulting ideas are developed further and culminate in first functional prototypes. They cover a predefined performance range and are subject to further international usability and acceptance tests. Also later during the specification and implementation phase rapid prototyping helps to guarantee the user centered design process and implement a common understanding in the international interdisciplinary development team. In the following this innovation process is briefly represented with the example of the development of a new office phone generation for Siemens.