Need Your Advice!

A small team consisting of mobile phone developers, engineers, and designers has decided to create a mobile phone for children in a low-income illiterate group of families. According to traditional market research methodologies, a common approach would be to conduct focus groups and surveys and analyze the data collected to derive conclusions about what the phone should be like.

Now, while interviewing a child, who could be a potential customer of the phone, they ask him/her “what” does he/she needs or wants on the phone.  A dozen of such interviews reveal that the most common features children liked to have on their phones are a good camera, GPS, social media apps, a music player and games in addition to utilities like a calculator, clock, calendar, and browser.

Although, performance is an unspoken quality that mobile users seek in a good phone. But all the features demanded by the interviewees cannot be implemented under the given speed and space constraints. Games, music player, social media apps and GPS are some features that use a lot of processor cycles and memory.

Moreover, the users in the target market are unaware of these tradeoffs as they don’t understand the intricacies of developing a mobile phone. Hence the design team is posed with a challenge to choose between desirability and feasibility. They realize that they have to compromise one aspect to some extent in order to accommodate another so that the product design is viable for their business.

One of the ways to resolve this conventionally would be to research more on the configuration required on the phone and hence ask the users about the technical specification they would want on their phones. A simple such configuration is defined in terms of Gigabytes, frequency (Hz), megapixel of camera, processor chipset, CPU, GPU, operating system, speaker type, screen resolution (pixels), WLAN, SIM size, etc in addition to the color, price, and weight of the phone.

Now, should the team ask their users to specify these attributes of the phone? What might be their answer, if they do? Remember, these are children not educated enough to decipher technical jargons and have limited or no access to advanced technology. You are a consulting design thinker and the team approaches you to give them useful guidance on how to solve this problem. What would you advise them?

There could be many solutions to this problem, therefore considering as many options and perspectives as possible can be helpful in overcoming this challenge. So feel free to comment and give your inputs.

Karishma Shah

MISM 2016-17