Design input is important to Xerox because it has helped it respond to challenging market conditions. The expiry of a number of key patents on its copying and printing technologies during the 1980s opened up many of its core markets to significant new competition.
In response, Xerox was forced to transform its business practices, concentrating on adding customer value to its traditional technology offering through improved design and the growth of significant service capability.
This transition continues today. The company has sold much of its manufacturing capability and has changed from an upstream vertically integrated player in imaging, printing and hardware markets to being an integrated supplier of tools and techniques to capture, organise, facilitate and enhance how people communicate.
Xerox sees design and the user experience as key competitive differentiators in the current market and invests heavily to improve this aspect of its entire product and service offering.
Xerox has a strong history of engineering and innovation. The company invests six per cent of its annual revenue into R&D, runs four research centres worldwide and holds a portfolio of more than 8,000 active US patents. Current areas of research include colour science, digital imaging, computing, work practices, electromechanical systems and new materials.
Xerox is a strongly engineering-led organisation, with a large workforce of design-engineers. The company’s Industrial Design and Human Factors (IDHF) function, traditionally a separate department within Xerox, is now fully integrated with its wider product development organisation. Based at Xerox Europe Technical Centre in Welwyn Garden City, the IDHF team comprises around 14 people, and is managed by Les Wynn who is also the champion for new ways of using design within Xerox as a whole.
Xerox has a strong record of design and human factors expertise. Today the company is transforming its design processes to allow designers to exert more effective influence as the organisation increases its focus on user experience. Key elements of this transformation include:
- Aligning central design research activities with the needs of specific product programmes
- Equipping designers with manufacturing engineering capabilities to help preserve design intent through to production
- Using informal networks to promote an appreciation of design upstream and downstream in the organisation
- Making use of more strategic business tools such as Six Sigma and FMEA processes, both to improve the effectiveness of design decision-making and to ensure designers communicate using the same language as their engineering counterparts
Wynn’s team of designers at Xerox Europe Technical centre consists of industrial designers, user interface specialists and human factors experts. Most designers are highly experienced and it is normal practice for them to have expertise in more than one design discipline. For example, many of the designers have multiple degrees combining psychology, computer sciences, ceramics, user interface, human factors, engineering and graphics.
Wynn considers that it’s the combination of skills such as these that enables the designers to feed into multiple stages of the development process. The UK office has a core team of eight designers, and workload requirements are supplemented with temporary contractors. This occasionally expands the team to over a dozen.
One consequence of the requirement for this level of skills is that Xerox’s designers tend to be mature and experienced. Wynn adds: ‘I think the skills sets will be changing…you can’t look at the process without looking at how the business itself is changing.’