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Product design with end users

Have you ever noticed how terrible the parking signs are in any major US city. When you need to park your car in any major US city, it takes 5 minutes to decipher the information in the parking sign to understand if it is ok to park in that spot.

Nikki Sylianteng , a designer , turned this problem into an opportunity and posted her designs nearby some of these parking signs. The new designs evoked good response. You can read all bout that here at Priceonomics.




This designer tried out something that we should all be doing more often with products - design  and get feedback. While this is easier said than done, we set out to try and deism collaboratively with our clients.

When we designed a data product initially for retailers, we were looking at typical retailer data and inferences and designed our product.



This is how our product looked initially. When we presented this at the NRF Big show, some of the feedback made us look at decision points rather than inferences. Lesson well learnt.

Buyers in retail companies use a tool during a decision point and not randomly for data and inference they can get out of it.





Our next version that we developed was done within the space of 2 weeks.


We ran it through a couple of retailers and started to understand that when we design products, we have to sit with our end users not the people who might buy this tool for us by others.


We ran it through a couple of retailers and started to understand that when we design products, we have to sit with our end users not the people who might buy this tool for us by others.

This time we decided to hit the road with our design board, our tool and our prototypes with multiple versions of the tool.

We met 10 retailers across 3 cities at their retail locations, talked to the end users on constraints under which they operate the tool and found some very interesting scenarios for our product. We also had conversations with the designers from other products to understand a couple of more design inferences that we miss rout early.




With more annotated designs , copious notes from user research and interviews, we designed out final product and deployed it across 2 retailers.

We are getting more feedback as users have now started using the product.
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