phase1 - market & product definition page
At the beginning stands a meeting with your team to review your goals and design criteria for the new product. We'll discuss who will be your target customer, how they will use the new product and what their expectations for a product such as ours may be.
You may have input from your customers and retailers, and we will analyze your competitors' products together and may test their functionality. We'll also review constraints and technical requirements and talk about your existing engineering and manufacturing resources.
All this information will form the basis of our design brief, which will also include expected timelines. In order to communicate our chosen creative direction, the design brief may include mood boards showing reference images of environments, shapes, materials and design details.
to give you an example: for our smoke detector project, we looked at existing battery operated ionization sensing smoke detectors and tested mounting and operating them. We also interviewed people about their experiences and challenges with smoke detectors in living areas. We reviewed fire safety regulations as well as technical component sizes and required clearances inside the plastic enclosures.
Based on our chosen design direction (contemporary look and feel, simple shapes with minimal detailing complexity), we created mood boards to visualize interior environments and the level of design of other items that are placed on the wall or ceiling of a room.