For the set top box project, Ed Snodgrass, Product Design Manager at BSkyB, worked with the company's product development managers to prepare a brief for design consultancy Frog Design
The company wanted to develop a series of three separate set top box units, offered at different price points and with different capabilities. Each unit was to have its own distinct identity, but they should share a common design language.
BSkyB’s aims included:
- Differentiating its set top boxes from other entertainment products in consumers’ homes
- Reflecting the high end technology within the set top box, but remaining usable by anyone from 7 to 70
- Developing a solution that could be practically implemented with existing manufacturers and did not excessively increase manufacturing costs.
BSkyB also provided agencies with brand information at this stage. Frog Design responded with a detailed proposal and the two organisations agreed a budget and timescales for the project.
Discover – Design – Deliver
After the initial pitch, Frog Design was invited to produce initial concepts for the new BSkyB set top boxes, using the process it has developed for managing all design projects which it calls Discover – Design – Deliver. Alongside this process, Frog Design operates a formal internal management structure for its design projects, with a Programme Manager and Creative Director responsible for coordinating all Frog Deisgn’s efforts and ensuring that research, client liaison and creative activities are tightly coordinated. The Creative Director is also responsible for coordinating the activities of the designers working on the project.
Accordingly, Frog Design approached the set top box project with an intense ‘Discover’ phase which was used to analyse the BSkyB brand values, consumer expectations, the manufacturing envelope and future roll-out, and rationalise these into formal design language documentation that would enable the organisation to gain significant control over future design and 3D brand representation of BSkyB.
Frog Design developed four concepts in line with a positioning model, which mapped out the opportunity for BSkyB to not only express key brand values (such as ‘entertainment’) through product design, but also to differentiate the BSkyB brand from its competitors. ‘We came up with the recommendation that BSkyB needed to have a much more expressive product on the market, that it needed to create identity,’ explains James Whittaker, Creative Director at Frog Design's German offices.
User Research
BSkyB places high priority on research - carrying out extensive user research, particularly on the ergonomics of its products and remote controls as well as the usability of its software offerings such as the on screen electronic programme guide with which users navigate the platform - and this philosophy was well complemented by Frog Design’s capabilities in this area.
An important element of this in the BSkyB set-top box project, says Whittaker, was to give both consultancy and the client a deeper understanding of real consumer behaviours and needs. Frog Design and BSkyB applied a broad range of techniques including ethnographic research and observational studies, before creating a highly detailed internal brief used to take the design processes forward.
Both Snodgrass and Whittaker emphasise, however, that user research cannot be limited to ‘asking consumers what they want’, and Snodgrass notes that while this research is a powerful tool to improve usability, its utility is limited for the evaluation of the industrial design of the company’s products as customers rarely articulate useful feedback on these aspects of the products.
Market
BSkyB produces its own media content, supplies channel packages to cable companies and other TV distributors and distributes content via broadband and mobile networks for consumption on a wide variety of devices. Its primary activity, however, is the distribution of more than 138 TV channels and audio content to subscribers in the UK.