Design cycles at Xerox vary in length, from four years for the introduction of a major new product line or technology, to six months for the updating of an existing product range.
With the new focus on design input during the fuzzy front end of projects, the beginning of the Xerox design team’s input into a process will vary according to the individual project. The design team at Xerox rarely receive formal briefs anymore, but rather aim to work with the product programmes to identify opportunities and address user needs.
The team has had, says Wynn, ‘some success with design-led projects’, where the design team will contribute in the initial product specification phases, define the desired end form of the product and establish size and shape parameters to be fulfilled by engineering. The company also undertakes an extensive competitive benchmarking programme, dismantling competitor products to understand their designs and their designers’ approaches to cost reduction and quality assurance.
Most commonly, designers work on top of an existing engineering platform, which defines the key physical parameters of their solution. Designers will have at least two or three projects on the go, and work is integrated with the project team, which will be familiar with the project’s overall success criteria.
In more depth Read about how during the
Define stage of the design process the product develops
Concept development may involve several members of the Xerox design team and the department completes strenuous internal reviews before taking a concept proposal forward to the wider team for evaluation. The objective, says Wynn, is not to give the wider team multiple options from which to select, but to recommend a single, best option that can be refined in later iterations to achieve the desired result. That way, he says, ‘the arguments are over the details and everyone takes responsibility for the finished product.’
The design team uses a wide range of tools more familiar in the engineering design context in order to make sure its proposals are robust before taking them forward. It will, for example, conduct a thorough failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) to identify and compensate for potential problems. An FMEA study identifies the different ways in which a product may fail, then prioritises these potential failures according to their likelihood, seriousness and ease of identification, allowing the designers to concentrate improvement efforts on known weaknesses of a product.
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development methods and how, in this stage of the design process, prototyping and iterating the concept can get it as close to being an end product or service as possible
The designers develop their solutions using 3D CAD. Xerox has extensive in-house rapid prototyping capability, but the desire to deliver rapidly and at minimum cost, combined with the design team’s extensive experience in 3D CAD, means that physical prototyping is kept to a minimum until concepts are close to completion.
Xerox makes extensive use of user observation to evaluate the performance of its designs. Xerox is a business-to-business organisation, not business-to-consumer. This makes a profound difference to the requirements placed on the designers, says Wynn. ‘Many of our products are bought without people ever seeing what they look like, so design does not fulfil the role in retail that it might in other businesses,’ he says. ‘However, once in place, our products are a very direct advertisement for the company. A lot of our attention today is on designing for five years in use. Will the product degrade elegantly? Is it easy to clean?’
In more depth See how other companies in our study use
final testing to identify constraints or problems with their products before manufacture
Given this context, user research and observation is conducted in a variety of ways. Machines are set up in real office environments – including, quite extensively, Xerox’s own offices - and equipped with cameras that automatically record user behaviour, using a sensor to activate the recording system when the machine is approached.
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testing is a vital part of the development process
This type of observation is supplemented by analysis of service calls and demands for spare parts – both strong indicators of the frequency of machine and design failures.
Designers also spend time with service engineers visiting customer sites and discussing issues with customers. More recently, says Wynn, he has also encouraged designers to visit suppliers in the manufacturing chain, who can provide powerful insights into the implications of certain design decisions for manufacturing quality and cost.
In more depth Read about how other companies in our study set
targets for evaluating the success of their product design
Xerox’s designers also get involved in post-product launch focus groups, including helping to produce the visual materials and models used in the sessions.
Measuring the impact of design input separately from other aspects of product performance is difficult, however, according to Wynn. Xerox uses customer satisfaction scores as a key performance measure, but design is only one of many contributing factors here.
Xerox has a business group that looks after each product segment at the launch stage. The team consists of marketing and product planners. This group is responsible for working out the product portfolio and ensuring that the correct target markets are identified. This group is closely aligned to the marketing and design teams.