What working method led this design studio to put textiles on a speaker?

At the Mindpark Creative Conference, presented jointly by TOPYS and Yingtou Land during Shenzhen Design Week, QDaily interviewed the Danish design studio design-people.

Among Danish design studios, design-people, founded by Henrik Mathiassen, is an oddity.

Product design is their main business, yet they rarely wave the “Nordic design” banner. What they talk about instead is the research that comes before the design. They consider user research their strength, and have even put out paid user-research reports — which makes them look more like a consulting firm.

That “academic” air has turned into design-people's advantage.

“When we show clients the methods behind our design work, they're very willing to listen. But if we did what we did in our early years — walk into a meeting and say we make beautiful Nordic design — they'd probably reply that ten other companies had already been in touch that same week,” Henrik said in an interview with QDaily.

When he started the studio in 2005, Henrik did try beginning from “beautiful Nordic design,” and designed furniture. He soon found the market “very narrow.” His predecessors' classics loomed too large, too many of his contemporaries could design good-looking Nordic furniture, and whenever he approached a brand about working together, the answer came back as a question: “What's special about you?”

After moving into the wider field of product design, Henrik and his team found an opening. Talking to different clients, they discovered that many brands knew very little about their own users — some even defined their user base as the entire world's population, an ambition that is plainly a disaster for product design.

To help clients understand how users think, shop and what they need, and in the end design better products, design-people set up a research team of its own, which runs user research at the start of every project. That rational approach to design later brought them work with Microsoft, LG and other large companies, and won them international awards including iF, Red Dot and the Good Design Award.

As for method: besides working with professional research firms to send out questionnaires and collect user data, design-people's people often go to users' homes to hear what they think of a product and watch how they react while using it.

Henrik thinks “observation” is the crucial part. “A lot of the time, when you ask users straight out how a product is, they'll tell you, ‘oh, this is really easy to use.’ But watch them actually work it and you find that isn't so. They do get the product running in the end, but it takes a lot of steps in between — pressing a lot of buttons, for instance.”

During one round of research on consumer electronics, Henrik and his team noticed something telling: every time they went to a home to talk about buying electronics, the woman of the house would push the man forward to do the talking. With products like DVD players, women also tended to have a husband or boyfriend install and set them up. Some of them said these products were “a bit complicated” for them.

“We don't think it should be that way. A good product should be easy to use. Often it isn't that female users genuinely don't understand how to use something — the design just isn't friendly enough, so they can't be bothered. The best design is the kind you can pick up and use,” Henrik told QDaily.

Digging deeper, they concluded that female users were a group well worth attention and not yet getting enough of it. After spending more than 10,000 hours over three years talking to female consumers, Henrik and his team found that “in many households it's the woman who decides what gets bought.”

Women's spending power keeps growing, too. Henrik likes to cite three examples: according to a 2010 Newsweek survey, Chinese women's contribution to household income had already matched men's by 2009; between 2008 and 2009, Danish women's disposable income reached six times that of men; and in Germany, over the 20 years from 1995 to 2015, women's growth rate in the labor market hit 10%.

The numbers may not all be precise, but to Henrik and his team they were a strong signal: female users are playing a bigger and bigger part in the consumer market.

Yet in a design industry run mostly by men, plenty of brands still misread female consumers. Take the Danish company Jabra, a well-known name in hands-free mobile technology — male consumers liked its headsets, but it could not attract enough female users.

Before working with Henrik's studio, Jabra had come up with a fix: make the headset pink. Many female users found the move not just “too clever by half” but “offensive,” and sales didn't move.

“We did more research, trying to understand what female users actually want, what gets in their way [when they use the product], and whether we could develop some of the product's latent features,” Henrik said.

The research showed that on function, many female users wanted to be able to do simple things without touching their phone; on looks, many young women wanted something prettier and more fashionable, since they wear headphones to listen to music wherever they go.

Put those answers together and what design-people finally designed was a “strap.” Users can sling it loosely around the neck, where it looks like a decorative band of fabric on a piece of clothing. But it connects to a phone over Bluetooth, and with the buttons “sewn” into the strap you can play music, take or reject a call, and adjust the volume.

While helping brands like Jabra win more female users, design-people kept sharpening its own picture of them. Over three years, from 2009 to 2012, the studio ran in-depth research with more than 1,500 women and more than 300 men in Europe, the Americas and Asia, asking how they see technology and what part it plays in their lives.

The project, called “Inspired by Women,” produced a paid guide, Guidebook to a Female Interaction Strategy, covering design-people's main findings on female consumers plus case studies, to show companies how to design for what women need.

Findings such as “tell her, through a meaningful story, how this product will improve her daily life” and “in social settings, this product should make her look good and feel good” then went into the speaker design for Vifa, the Danish high-end audio brand. Speakers that previously “didn't sell very well” quickly drew attention.

Vifa's original black-and-white speakers struck Henrik as “very old,” and their form was clumsy. For a speaker you carry to a party to play music, going big is obviously not smart. And if it sits at home, how to make it suit different furniture arrangements was another problem to solve.

Having settled on basic directions — “simple, good quality, a sense of craft, made with very good materials” — Henrik and his team went through round after round of brainstorming and reworked the design many times. Knowing that many female consumers lean toward textiles, his team also worked with a home-textile manufacturer to develop a fabric that sounds good and looks good, and wrapped it around the speaker in place of the old metal shell.

Henrik says the whole rebranding was pushed along very “carefully.” The speaker's colors, its shape, even the placement of the buttons and the logo all went back and forth through many revisions: “We paid enough attention to the details of the product to be sure the product that came out at the end was the right one.”

They designed four series for Vifa in all, named after the capitals of the four Nordic countries — Oslo, Helsinki, Copenhagen and Stockholm — each differing in size and shape. Vifa's logo is tucked discreetly onto the side, yet all four speakers give off the same feel, enough that you can tell at a glance which brand they belong to.

Oslo and Helsinki are very small, more like little handbags. The first is square, with a metal handle; the second is rounder, with a handle of soft leather. Portable and nicely colored, they are easy to put anywhere: carried in the hand, they work as an accessory, like a purse; set down at home, they mix with furniture of different materials, and they can be hung on a door handle or a coat rack — no longer the old requirement of standing next to the TV cabinet to look right.

The bigger Copenhagen and Stockholm look more solemn. They suit standing in a room, either as a decorative piece that stands out or as something that melts into the furnishings.

To bring out what the product is, Henrik's team, helping Vifa promote it, deliberately skipped CES and other consumer-electronics shows and showed the speakers at furniture fairs instead. Many female consumers noticed them right away. “They were very interested in the product, and took photos to share on social networks. A few days later we started to see it become very popular online,” Henrik recalled.

The speaker design won design-people prizes from iF and Red Dot, and Vifa's speakers turned up in magazines around the world. “These are all lifestyle magazines, which help Vifa spread its brand globally,” Henrik said.

More interesting still, design-people's deep research on female consumers earned it an invitation from Microsoft to the Hack for Her summit, where people from different backgrounds discussed how to weigh women's perspectives more equally in product design, and so make sounder products and a better experience for buyers.

Today design-people puts about a quarter of the time on every project into user research. Attention to research on women has become an effective way for them to make products perform better and sell better.

“We know the subject of women can cause discomfort in some places. But we design a product to make it work better. It isn't that we design one thing for female consumers and then something else just for men — it's that once you take women's needs into account, you end up making a product that works better for people of either sex,” Henrik explained in his interview with QDaily.

As a Danish studio, Henrik also has to live with the market's “prejudices” about Danish design. “A few years ago, when people talked about Danish design, they were still talking about those classics from the sixties and seventies. Sometimes you really feel you've heard enough of it,” Henrik complained.

He has no intention of sticking to one field the way his predecessors gave themselves wholly to furniture. His team designs industrial products and does a fair amount of digital work as well. “We do all sorts of things, which to some extent keeps us from boxing ourselves in and keeps us alert,” he said. Researching users is one effective way they hold on to that alertness.

As for Danish design, his view is: “The core of Danish design isn't really furniture and craft. It's respect — for nature, for users, for materials and quality — and it's taking the time to find a reasonable way to design. All of those traditions can carry over into digital product design today.”

The cover image and the in-text images (except where noted) come from design-people and vifa.