From the course: Design Research: Enhancing the Designer-Client Relationship

Course case study

From the course: Design Research: Enhancing the Designer-Client Relationship

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Course case study

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- [Instructor] The ideas and tools that I want to share with you are gonna make a lot more sense if we talk about them through a hypothetical project. This way we'll look at a real project-based scenario in order to think through how to react and respond appropriately. I'm gonna give you a made-up problem to consider throughout the duration of this course. The problem is completely fabricated; however, we'll use an existing business as our hypothetical client. We're also gonna base this off of an experience I had recently with this business. Free fact story, and I promise not to bore you with too much detail here. I just back from a vacation to Iceland. Beautiful country by the way. On this trip I took a new airline that I've never flown before. This airline is called WOW, and although they have a pretty big presence of purple planes and name that suggests how I should feel about the airline, I was hesitant at best. For those of you who have traveled before, you know how important it is to trust your airline. They are the gatekeepers of our comfort in the sky. So for me flying an airline that I've never been on before, it was a bit of a nerveracking experience. On top of that, WOW was a very affordable airline, so I'm thinking great, it's a new airline, I don't know anything about it, I didn't pay much for the tickets. So my mind jumps to all sorts of agonizing scenarios: leg room, rude flight attendants, bad smells, delays, the whole works. However, I was actually pleasantly surprised. This was a pretty great experience, and this whole thing, it got me thinking wow. Yes, pun intended. It has to be difficult for this airline to gain consumer trust especially when their primary value indicator is, hey, come fly with us. We're affordable. Remember the problem I'm about to lay out is not real. WOW has not asked us to help them in any way, but I think we can use my experience to imagine what if? What if WOW wanted to expand their growth, get more people to fly the airline, offer more routes, more flights, and so on? That seems plausible, right? What if they asked us to help them figure out how to best tell potential travelers what makes WOW a special airline, why people should fly with them beyond just their cheap fares? How can they get past the perception that cheap means sacrifice of comfort? So this also feels within the realm of possibilities, right? This is the basis of our course problem. We'll do some real research along the way, and we'll do some hypothetical thinking as well.

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