BODYSTORMING

We have developed a set of bodystorming tools that range from very quick ‘low resolution’ mock up spaces through to careful and detailed ‘theatre set’ spaces to test detailed process and technology usability. This testing or immersive ‘prototyping’ must be rapid, inexpensive and effective.

WORKSHOPS

Developing personas to characterise your customer segment profiles is very valuable to shape your data into usable packages. An interdisciplinary team made up of company personnel and your experience and service design agency team is best placed to develop personas and draw out insights around real customer needs.

PROTOTYPING & THEATRE SETS

IMPLEMENTING & EVALUATING

With a design tested through our process of bodystorming and prototyping you can be confident that the experience offered will resonate with customers. This helps focus stakeholders on the need for an agreed set of success measures, which are critical to evaluating the effectiveness of new designs, ensuring commitment to support them going forward.

INTRODUCTION

We can help you step inside your ideas before you build and get the most out of your space.

Crowd Productions can design and test your new retail and commercial spaces before you invest in the final outcome with our innovative set of Bodystorming techniques. We can provide you with rapid and effective ways to develop and test new architectural and fit-out designs for your retail and commercial spaces.

Business is about bringing ideas to life. Business manages the risks in this process by being as scientific as possible. Design is a vital part in this process but it brings change and currently this means taking a risk. So when you invest in a new project and a new design you have no way of testing it out before you commit. We provide a critical de-risking strategy with quick feedback and redesign opportunities. Our techniques also provide internal team building and a collective ownership of your new design.

We all expect our products, furniture, fashion, automobiles, phones and aircraft to be carefully designed and tested before we use or buy them. We should demand the same of architectural and retail space design. The user experience from architecture and in-store is made up of many elements and we can test these in concert to understand and refine the range of experiences users and customers will have to ensure that they are the ones you want. Designing and testing commercial and retail space around this understanding will create coherent, appealing and effective space to deliver more productive staff and satisfied customers. Crowd’s bodystorming workshops and design tools support a focused and iterative six stage process to de-risk design development and implementation. These workshops also focus stakeholders on the need organisational commitment to change and an agreed set of success measures.

Working with leading Australian brands, institutions and service providers including NAB, RTA, CUA, Australia Post, the Victorian and Federal governments, MCA, ACMI and Hoyts we have completed design projects that demonstrate the design and cost saving benefits of our approach. Testing innovative new design ideas first has allowed our clients to deliver, exhibit and go to market with unique and powerful new designs that have increased their profitability, customer numbers and staff satisfaction.

Crowd’s six stage design development and implementation process.

01. Research program.

02. Developing insights

03. Developing design solutions

04. Bodystorming, testing the design solutions for performance, failures and new opportunities

05. Implementation

06. Evaluation

BODYSTORMING

Testing the design solutions for performance, failures and new opportunities

‘Bodystorming’ or immersive testing is core to our process is of developing the design brief and concept design. The evaluation of the data and the subsequent mapping of personas, scenarios and design concepts are tested to evaluate them before you start to invest in expensive implementation. Significant new insights will be learnt and scenarios developed. These will be based on the unique and specific qualities of your organisation as it is ‘evidenced’ or enacted and represented in the bodystorming workshops. This testing or immersive ‘prototyping’ must be rapid, inexpensive and effective. We have developed a set of tools to do this that range from very quick ‘low resolution’ mock up spaces through to careful and detailed ‘theatre set’ spaces to test detailed process and technology usability. It is important that this process be very flexible so as to incorporate new ideas and insights learnt as part of the process. Once the final design has been approved the immersive bodystorming prototype can be used to train staff and suppliers.

The rapid bodystorming design toolkit we have developed delivers:

• A critical de-risking strategy

• Instantaneous testing, feedback and redesign of new concepts and ideas

• Harvesting the knowledge and experience of your entire team

• Internal team building and conflict resolution

• Creating internal champions of the design change

• Agreed on success measures to evaluate on going performance of innovations and new strategies

WORKSHOPS

Workshops and research program

You need to know and agree on where you are and where you want to go in order to know what will be the right decisions for your future success. You want your investment in innovation to succeed. Many companies collect quantitative data but very few know how to do this effectively or know how to use it. Often it contains untested assumptions and flaws. Yet when it is done well it can reveal significant new patters of behaviour and opportunities providing a focus for the qualitative research. Quantitative tools include surveys, field observations and management data.

Qualitative research gives you ethnographic data and allows you to develop engaging stories and powerful insights around your customer’s experiences. This research is critical to break down broad untested assumptions. Tools include observation, shadowing, diaries, interviews, focus groups and remote tracking.

Developing insights

The research data needs to be well presented graphically and mapped out to make it accessible and understandable. Developing personas to characterise your customer segment profiles is very valuable to shape your data into usable packages. An interdisciplinary team made up of company personnel and your experience and service design agency team is best placed to develop personas and draw out insights around real customer needs.

Developing design solutions

Designing the right customer experiences requires situating your insights and personas in an end to end journey and your new retail environment. The tools for this are scenarios and story boards to unpack the step by step journeys and interactions you want your customers to experience. These can be developed in team workshops or developed and presented by your experience design team for review and discussion. Storyboards should reveal the key touch points, as identified in our list of hardware and software elements, between your customers and our organisation. This work will then lead to a visual mapping of the ideal experience paths and to a design brief and concept design for your retail spaces ready for the testing and detail design stages

PROTOTYPING

Standard prototyping

For a company to deliver innovation, in practice, both technological change and cultural change is required. Industrial design has evolved a culture of technological research and development, synthesised into a design experimentation and development process, the results of which are then presented to end users or the public for testing and feedback. This process, prototyping, gives industrial designers a unique licence to experiment with more radical designs, fabrication and programmatic options, and integrate these into a product development regime designed to test or change public perception and expectation. This optimises the value of any investment into research and development. Research and development is by its nature expensive. Understanding the dynamics and potential for optimisation in prototyping is essential if one wants to learn and benefit from it, while controlling the costs and risks.

Spatial prototyping

By prototyping the scripts, processes and spaces that are to drive or shape the intended experiences, we can improvise and test new ideas in a controlled environment as part of the design process. You can’t successfully invent the future without prototyping it. The process of building prototypes not only profoundly influences the way design ideas are received, but it also refines and shifts the very ideas themselves. The conversational dynamic, through a prototyping process, can inform the possibilities of the design process in very rich ways, acting as a catalyst for new ideas and directions. This kind of prototyping as much harder than prototyping a chair. This involves the prototyping of a social artefact. Prototyping a new product service system requires prototyping all of the elements of the system. Invariably the mapping of the scenario will require the collection of data to construct a model of the potential actors and their relationships within the system.

IMPLEMENTING AND EVALUATING

Implementation

Rolling out your new design should be staged carefully. With a design tested through our process of bodystorming and prototyping you can be confident that the experience offered will resonate with customers. It is important however to ensure that key actors in the delivery of this design, the staff, suppliers and business collaborators are fully trained, briefed and supported in their new roles. Beginning with selected pilot sites will allow these actors time to adjust and deliver.

Evaluation

Our process helps focus stakeholders on the need for an agreed set of success measures. This becomes critical at the evaluation stage when assessments are made about the effectiveness of the new designs and the commitment to support them going forward. Qualitative and qualitative research can be undertaken, documentation of actual customer journeys and utilisation studies carried out to evaluate how effective the new design elements and zones are.

CROWD PRODUCTIONS

Crowd Productions is a design studio focused on creating and curating customer and staff experiences in physical space. We have 20 years of experience designing innovative retail and entertainment spaces for banks, retailers, health centres, cinemas and museums. We believe that the design of environments and technology should centre on the people within the space and these needs should drive fundamental shifts in how we script successful innovation.

We do this by:

01. Identifying the needs and wants of customer and user groups.

02. Creating scripts and testing the resulting desired experiences to meet those needs.

03. Translating those experiences into design outcomes and implementing and evaluating them.