Separating UX
into two separate

in users having to manage many distractions as they conducted sessions with their patients. This inspired many aspects of the product design, from the industrial design to alerting systems.

• Business stakeholders had a vested interest in the concept that was initially proposed by marketing. The research expert encouraged the UX team to design alternative concepts for evaluation and helped them build a protocol to understand which of their potential solutions would not work and why. As it turned out, although it was a great place to start the project, the initial concept proved to be a poor fit when compared with alternative concepts that supported distracted users. Even though these results were not what the business stakeholders expected to hear, they appreciated all the innovation, which was inspired to a great extent by the research expert who helped frame research questions early and influenced the team to test their initial assumptions.

In short, engaging a research guru early in the project helped the creative types not only in the planning of the research effort, but also throughout the concept-develop-ment phase. It also helped produce alignment across the lifecycle of the project. In this case, designers were able to achieve much more on a limited budget and short timeline thanks to the strong collaboration with research experts.

Meanwhile, the design experts’
input was also critical to the suc-
cess of this project:
• Designers felt it was important
to be sensitive to cultural dif-
ferences in discussing trade-offs
for different potential solution
ideas. After consultation from the
research expert on the gap-analysis
exercise, one of the designers on
the team was inspired to model a
concept-comparison exercise on a
car-shopping experience, because
this method allowed users to react
to concepts without being negative.
Themes were selected for each con-
cept based on the gap analysis. This
ended up being a very efficient and
effective way to capture detailed
user needs.

research and design
roles can have a
negative side, namely,
the unintended
consequence of
pitting research
and design against
each other and
encouraging
disjointed product
development.

November + December 2012