Goodbaby is a leading international company in the field of durable juvenile product. They are engaged in the research and development, manufacturing, marketing and sale in over 90 countries.
I was working at their Dutch overseas R&D office in Utrecht.
I had a few different responsibilities. One of them was to conduct user researches and product tests regularly.
Here I will show one example of researches during the product development process.
April 2011 – April 2015
User research
Product testing
This product was called CarryCoon, which was an innovative baby car seat. The concept was when not driving, the parents only need to take the inner layer (the carrier) together with the baby, leaving most of the weight inside the car, creating natural parents/child interaction and increasing baby mobility.
In the early concept phase, we did two focus group to see what would be the reaction from parents towards this potential product, could they adopt this new lifestyle and if so what features they would wish to be integrated.
At the prototyping phase, we did a four day usability test to check if the users were using the product as we expected, improve the details, and tried to get a price indication.
Pre-questionnaires were sent out to the participants 2 weeks upfront to collect information of their current experience.
During the session, participants first talked over the interesting points from their pre-questionnaire, and shared their positive and negative experience of using their current products.
Fig: pre-questionnaire
Fig: flipcharts
The main part of the focus group was to have the CarryCoon concept and prototype presented and tried out by the participants. Each of them needed to give feedback of whether there’s a need, which features they would like to be included, what did they not like about it, etc.
In the end, all feedbacks were documented and the important ones were highlighted. The questionnaire scores were also analyzed. The outcome showed this concept could have a potential market. Parents liked the core idea. But we needed to pay special attention to the ease of use of this product.
All result were presented to related designers for future reference.
Fig: Scores of all aspects from different focus groups
Participants at one of the focus groups. I was standing at the top right corner introducing product concept
This session was mainly observing user behavior of how they use the improved version in different scenario settings.
Participants were asked to try all functions after a short introduction of the product, to see how intuitive the product was to potential users. While trying, participants needed to express what they feel and why they feel that why.
Short interviews were conducted before and after the observation, to open up the topic and round up the session.
In the end, participants needed to put the product in a price category and rate the product in many aspects.
All result were presented to designers and integrated into next round of development.
Fig: Participants screening, product rating questionnaire and session photos.
