Industrial design
Creating a new opportunity for a growing start-up
My task was to expand Swyft's product offering and manage the process, taking them into a new market.
I took internal stakeholders on the journey to understand what new innovation Swyft could offer their customers. Resolving customer problems that they didn’t know they had through gaining insight and creating a product that truly helped users whilst maintaining the brand values.
Taking a holistic design approach I orchestrated the expansion of their product offering from only sofas to beds and more.
Gaining empathy
I conducted at a number of observational studies to understand how people went about assembling a standard flat pack bed.
I observed users in a real life context taking video, notes and asking questions as the task of assembling an Ikea bed was completed. I was looking for assembly time, frustrations, confusion, sticking points, what questions were they asking eachother and how they used the instructions.
These insights along with further process analysis led to the creation of a journey map which helped visualise the problem space, what practical issues and user pinch-points.
The main pinch-point from the user journey is the assembly process. Beds are notoriously difficult to assemble and nearly all beds are flatpack with around 40 screws. This, therefore, was the main area of development - replacing all the screws with one single fixing mechanism, reducing assembly time and complexity.
Average assembly time for the test bed as 56 minutes which I used as a benchmarking measure similarly to average task time when doing a heuristic site evaluation.
The development
With a clear direction for the product I began exploring how to design a mechanism that assembled without screws or tools while still providing sufficient strength for the application to pass mandatory strength test (BS EN 1725).
Prototyping through 3D-printing plastic and CNC milling aluminium to test and iterate the design was crucial for making production representative prototypes. The final solution to the bed locking mechanism was designed with clear affordances with visual queues to help the user assemble the bed.
User testing
At multiple stages throughout the development process I conducted observation usability testing to gain vital user feedback on the assembly of the bed and comprehension of the assembly instructions.
Under consistent test conditions users were given set tasks to complete depending on what part of the design required testing. After every test session a post test survey was conducted including a short questionnaire using a Likert scale to provide comparable results. This was alongside a semi-structured discussion to get their opinions, thoughts and feelings to get rich feedback to complement the observation notes.
The product
The most important aspect of the product is the locking mechanism. The aesthetic is a secondary consideration as many different styles can be applied to the underlying assembly solution. Through placing the user at the forefront of the design process and throughout its development the final solution remained user-centred and true to the issues highlighted in the initial user journey map.
View the bed on the Swyft website.
The learnings
In the framing phase of the UCD process some key metrics were selected for measuring the ease of assembly for the user. To compare results a near identical bed was selected as a base line comparison and the results were very positive:
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Average build time reduced by 48 minutes
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Reduced assmebly steps from 30 to 7
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52 less pages in the assembly instructions
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4 pieces of assembly hardware rather than 52
It’s a smart solution which puts the user at the forefront of the design but I believe that it is fundamentally flawed. As a new product being sold there is no foresight towards the circular economy: recycling at end-of-product-life or maximising the ‘use-phase’ with washable or changeable covers. It's an important aspect of any new product being produced to consider it's environmental impact and one that I care a lot about.
