Disabled persons as lead users for silver market customers

Abstract

It is important to understand user needs when developing new products. User-centered design provides tools for learning about the user needs in question, but studying only the target market customers may result in constricted need data because of the functional fixedness of these customers. Lead user approach, on the contrary, aims to learn from the lead users of a certain target group in order to find better solutions for the needs in the target market. In this chapter, I show through a study on mobile phones, how disabled persons can be seen as lead users when developing products for silver market customers. I also present methods for exploring the needs and solutions that disabled users possess. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.