I chose my brother, Alex, as a my target customer for this project. We’re bff’s and know each other very well, so it was an easier and more intimate conversation than is typical in these situations. As such, broaching the topic was easy. I told him that I’m taking this super cool class taught by the most scholarly, reverent and handsome professor that I’ve ever had and that I had designed this product and wanted to know what he thought about it. Alex has some experience w/CAD and is a pretty crafty dude, so I would value his feedback about this whether or not he was my target customer. As the conversation progressed, I casually mentioned the situation I had outlined in my original design as “his problem” and suggested that this product might be great in situations like that. He responded w/an enthusiastic, “F@%k yeah!”
Despite his enthusiasm and the obvious coolness of the product, this situation is most certainly an inconvenience and not an actual “problem.” The product is cool and the design is clever enough, but it’s nothing revolutionary. And even though my target customer responded positively and enthusiastically, and has spent money on similar, albeit inadequate solutions to this inconvenience in the past, he’s not losing any sleep over it. This was no surprise to me, which supports all of my original hypotheses – that this is a cool gadget that would be useful and fun to use, but is more a convenience/luxury than it is a solution to one of life’s great inadequacies. But that doesn’t diminish my value proposition at all. In fact, it only increases the value proposition. My iPhone speaker/stand isn’t curing cancer, but if a fickle guy with great taste is excited about it, then it might be a viable venture worth pursuing. That duck whistle guy made a mint.
This conversation ultimately led me to want to make the design sleeker and sexier, more compact. The basic concept is cool and simple enough. Once superior or even adequate functionality is achieved, aesthetic appeal and tactile enjoyment are the keys to distinguishing this product from its competition. The only other problem that surfaced, or at least made itself once again apparent, during our conversation is that he smokes/his wife doesn’t like him smoking. I imagine I would not be writing this blog post if I had a solution for that.
Hmmm I don’t know if you have a path forward with this specific idea (maybe you do) but lets think about the “issue”. You can’t fix his smoking habit but what bothers him about the tv issue? Is it he can’t hear, can’t see, or both? Does it matter that he doesn’t really care that it has not been “fixed” so far? Would someone other than him pay $5 for this? Would he take this device, his phone, his cigarette, (maybe his jacket), and stand outside for 3-5 minutes and use the item? I am not being critical but asking these questions because when you identify there is no real problem, the “convenience/cool” factor goes up by a lot and so do design expectations (inserting my smiley face now). But it could be a fun project to play around with.
While I do like the product, I’m struggling to see how its different or better than a radio/alarm/dock or a portable bluetooth speaker for an iphone. I know it keeps the phone on its side but I’m not sure its a significant enough innovation for this to be a viable product. I do, however, empathize with his wife about him smoking and if there is any chance you could come up with some kind of solution to help smokers quit, I’d buy it for my mother in a heartbeat.
How to get people to stop smoking, the greatest design challange problem of the last 50 years! Maybe combining it with something not obviously to do with smoking is the genius solution.
It was a good effort and I can see what you might have tried to make but there are many alternates for an issue like this. Maybe you can just make a desk cell phone holder with a design that would just echo the voice for just a single user sitting at his/her desk. Just a thought
Finding problems was difficult for most of us! And there are hundreds of products that promise to rid us of all our annoyances available on amazon. I’m looking forward to finding out what you decided to do for the next iteration of this project (or if you restarted).
What if you designed an actual phone case that stays around the phone all the time and also acts as a speaker that’s higher quality than the phone itself? I’m sure it would be tough to get it to be thin enough…I guess it could just be a small rectangle that pops into the bottom of the phone and acts as a speaker as well. There’s definitely a market for small bluetooth speakers and they have their limitations (having to find it, it takes time to connect it) so I think there could be some room for improvement on them!