5.7 Innovation, design, & marketing specifications
Essential Idea
Successful innovations typically start with detailed design and marketing specifications.
Nature and Aims of Design
Nature of Design
Designers must establish clear parameters for a marketing specification in order to create unique and creative solutions to a problem. Designers need to collect valid and useful data from the target market and audience throughout the design cycle to ensure the specification includes certain essential components.
Aims of Design
Aim 4: The ability to transform their research findings into a series of specifications is a skill that designers must develop to become successful. Being able to express parameters and requirements succinctly allows the designer to develop focused solutions to the design problem and meet a client or the target market’s wants and needs.
Guidance
As a DP Design Technology student, you should:
Understand how market sectors and segments can be used to establish target markets
Understand how a target audience is used to establish the characteristics of users
Describe and Analyze design contexts for different target markets and audiences
Concepts and Principles
Classifying your users is an essential component of your IA. You can use this information in Criteria A1, A2 and A3 to create specifications, identify extreme users, as well as determine which individuals to interview, observe, or involve in user testing.
Marketing Specifications
Marketing specifications are developed from careful analysis and research of the target market and user need.
Target Markets and Target Audiences
A target market describes the sectors and segments within a population. It is a general term that describes a large group of people that are targeted for advertising, marketing, or a particular product or service.
A target audience is a narrower definition that describes the specific characteristics of the users within each sector or segment.
Target markets can be separated in the following ways:
Segmented: Divided according to shared geographic characteristics (address, location, climate, country, etc.)
Demographic or Sociographic: gender, age, income, education, stage in the family life cycle
Psychographic: similar attitudes, values, or lifestyles (eg. religion, political or religious values, environmental activism.)
Behavioral : the types of behavior consumers display when making a purchasing decision. It is related to their knowledge of, attitude towards, use of, and response to a particular product.
Market analysis and User need
Market analysis refers to an appraisal of the economic viability of the proposed design from a market perspective, taking into account fixed and variable costs and pricing. It is typically a summary about potential users and the market.
The economic viability of a product refers to ability of the product to make a profit. If a product is very expensive to produce, and the potential user group is small and unwilling to pay a high price, then the economic viability of a product is very low. Conversely, if the demand for the product is high despite its high cost, the product can be considered economically viable.
When calculating the cost of a product, costs are divided into fixed and variable costs. Fixed costs refer to costs that do not change regardless of the quantity produced. Rent, insurance, and salaries are examples of fixed costs. Variables costs are the costs related to the volume of the product being produced. Resources such as the raw materials are examples of variable costs.
Any marketing specification should identify the essential requirements that the product must satisfy in relation to the market and the user need. It is useful for designers to consider how their product meets the different needs of a user.
Research methods
Research on users, target market, and is an important aspect of design and is essential for ensuring a design successfully enters the marketplace.
Designers use a variety of approaches to research in order to gain insight and understanding about their users, needs, target market, and performance requirements.
Expert appraisal: The reliance on the knowledge and skills of an expert in the operation of the product.
Literature Review: The use of consumer reports, newspaper, magazines, encyclopedias, manufacturers information, etc. to conduct research.
Performance test: Testing and evaluating a product under specific conditions (drop test, waterproofness, etc.)
User Research: Obtaining users’ responses through questionnaires/surveys and interviews.
User trial: The observation of people using a product and collection of comments from people who have used a product.
Competition
When inquiring into a new design need, a thorough analysis of competing designs is required to establish the market need. The designer needs to understand the market in order to successful place their product. Every product entering the market attempts to distinguish itself by being innovative, using attractive marketing schemes, or selling at a different price point.
Through analyzing the competition, designers can benchmark their design against an existing product in order to identify the minimum features needed to be successful.
Design specifications
A design specification relates to the requirements of a product and details important aspects of the design goal.
The purpose of the design specification is to state what a successful design looks like.
Specifications can be divided into two categories:
Constraints: These are elements of the design that cannot be changed. They are limitations or essential requirements for the design. Dimensions (Size), Cost, Material or Process are examples of constraints.
Considerations: These are elements of the design that must be thought about. The constraints might These often have multiple solutions and it is up to the designer to find the optimum solution.
Specifications
A typical design specification will include the following:
aesthetic requirements
cost constraints
customer requirements
environmental requirements
size constraints
safety considerations
performance requirements and constraints
materials requirements
manufacturing requirements.
any others that pertain to the design context
Design Specifications and the IA:
Clear, well-defined, and relevant specifications are important because you will refer to your specifications throughout the design cycle. You will use the specifications to guide the development of your ideas, justify the selection of the final design, and in the designing of tests and evaluation of your final design .
User Research
Topic 7, User Centered Design, introduces and discusses strategies for user research.
The Design Library in the classroom also has a wide selection of books and resources to help you plan and conduct user research.