What Product Developers Really Need to Know - Capturing the Major Design Elements

Abstract

Digitalization is no longer about finding data or inputs to different business processes as advances in technology now enables us to capture and/or retrieve all needed data. The challenges lie in the quality of the data, not only in the narrowest technical sense of the term, but also in relation to the extent of what e.g. product developers really need to know in order to support their processes and how this should be presented. In four industrial R&D projects, financed by the Norwegian Research Council and the EU, these challenges have been addressed. In the first project, a traditional approach was chosen. Here overall objectives and use-cases were defined, and the project quickly jumped to what everybody (including industrial users and research scientists) believed what the users needed and what could be provided to users from pre-defined data sources. However, it became clear that this did not necessarily match what the users really needed. This is in line with experiences from more traditional process mapping. Through the four R&D projects, a methodology focusing on what the product developer really needs, named “Major Design Elements” was developed, tested and implemented. The approach is to identify the most important design elements, then find what kind of knowledge is required, including relevant analyzes, data and sources. This together with an understanding of the relevant processes form the basis for a Design Dashboard enhancing the product development process.