Case study: the China Home Learning PC
(Editor’s Note: Herman D’Hooge, innovation strategist in the User-Centered Platform Solutions Division at Intel, explains a user-centered innovation process and how your company can use it to engineer and develop innovative products. D’Hooge also gives an example of a product—China Home Learning PC—that was developed for the Chinese consumer market with this strategy.)
-- EDN, May 23, 2006
By Herman D’Hooge, Innovation Strategist, Intel
Table of Contents:
How to foster innovation
Translate process into engineering product requirements
Case study: the China Home Learning PC
The China Home Learning PC is a simplified case study of a real product development that Intel’s Desktop Platforms Group undertook. The project was kicked off in early 2003 and resulted in a product launch in January 2005. The following description, which is highly simplified, illustrates how the user-centered process operates when a market opportunity sparks the product innovation process.
Market opportunity
In early 2003, a quantitative market research study showed that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had a very sizable number of households that (1) could economically afford a PC and (2) desired a PC but (3) had not purchased one. This sparked the interest of marketers and the user-centered design team in learning more about these households and what would be required for them to make a PC purchase decision. If the standard PC didn’t entirely meets their needs, how could it be improved?
Contextual research
Learning about these households required us to travel to China and visit the homes of families that were representative of the identified market segment. This needs-finding research highlighted several items—especially in families with a child aged 6 to 12:
• The child is the family celebrity (see photos below [[TK.]]). Given the Chinese 4-2-1 family structure (4 grandparents, 2 parents, 1 child) under the one-child policy, most of a family’s attention is directed to the child.
• Education of the child is the highest priority. Families make great sacrifices to ensure a good education. Also, what matters most is good grades in school. Good grades, even at a very young age, translate into more opportunities later in life.
• Learning to read, write and speak both Mandarin Chinese and English are both cornerstones of education.
• Yet, personal computers in the home were largely perceived as a distraction to education, with the child being lured into playing games or wasting time on the Internet.
The visits also gave us a very crisp impression of what a typical Chinese home or apartment looks like and where any personal computer device would be sitting, where electrical outlets are, the nature of the Internet connection and so on. The findings were condensed into a small set of personas that described a young family that became the target for user experience development. The persona was the definition of the target user of the product to be defined.
Although the engineering staff involved in the project at the time did not participate in any actual field work or observations, due to logistical constraints, a persistent information and work space, referred to as the China Room, was used as a proxy. Rich with photos and other relevant artifacts, it allowed for some level of immersion by the U.S.-based product definition team. Most of the user experience development work was conducted in the China Room. Entering the room mentally transported the team members, enabling them to think in terms of the target user and environment.
User experience development
The goal of the user experience development was to define the PC-like user experience that would meet the needs of the target persona enough that the prospective purchasers would be more inclined to buy and deploy the product. We also constructed a replica of a section of a typical Chinese apartment in a corner of the China Room, to remind the product definition team of the constraints of the physical space in which the resultant product would have to fit.
A wide range of possibilities was generated that was ultimately reduced to just a few leading product concepts. The major user-level requirements were the following:
1. The product must have relevant educational content (Mandarin Chinese, English, math) tied to the school curriculum for the ages being targeted.
2. Learning to read, write and speak must make relevant use of computing capabilities.
3. The system must provide both keyboard and mouse interaction, in addition to handwriting with a stylus.
4. Parents must be given a mechanism that is easy to understand and trust for confining the system’s activities to just the educational content.
5. The system must also function as a state-of-the-art, full-function personal computer for use by the adults in the household.
6. The product must fit well physically in a typical Chinese apartment.
These external product behavior requirements were then translated into technical solutions and constraints. Here are some of the original design illustrations:
The chosen solution for parental control was a physical lock-and-key mechanism. The parent holds the key, which controls whether the activities of the user are confined to educational content only. This was a simple and familiar metaphor that parents readily understood.
The keyboarding and handwriting options were provided by a dual-mode monitor with a stylus touch overlay. Move the monitor into upright mode for use with a keyboard and mouse; pull it down and horizontal for use with a stylus.
Writing and speaking were supported by the computer in the form of handwriting matching and speech matching against an expected prompt. For example, the computer software might play a spoken sentence, prompting the child to repeat it. The software captures the sentence spoken by the child and matches it against the ideal pronunciation, possibly providing relevant feedback to the child on how to improve. This is much easier than handwriting recognition or speech recognition, with which the system may have little anticipation of what the user will write or say next.
Many rounds of sketches, looks-like and works-like models were constructed that simulated the user experience and the product’s external physical characteristics. They were used as stimuli in focus groups with actual families in China. The user feedback gave the product team very valuable direction that let it refine the product concept and better understand the relative priority of various product features.
Engineers were deeply involved in the user experience development process, in terms of defining the experience and creating relatively focused engineering prototyping experiments to gain an early understanding of some of the technical challenges inherent in some of the product ideas. For example, a mechanism had to be devised to move the computer’s display from an upright vertical position to flat horizontal position for use as a writing tablet. And this had to be operable by someone as young as six years old.
This enhanced the probability that the resultant user experience would actually be technically viable and that all major technical risk areas would be identified early on. Direct engineering participation in all the discussions at this stage also made the engineers understand the entire rationale for why the product needed to function and look like it did.
Requirements translation and development
Once the user experience had been defined and a sufficient amount of early engineering thinking had been applied, the detailed engineering of the system could swing into action. The user-experience-level requirements were translated into a detailed set of technical requirements for all of the technologies that had to be developed and integrated. Creating high-level user experience requirements gave the engineering team room for lots of technical innovation in relation to how to architect and implement the system, as long as the user experience, product cost, budget and schedule targets were met.
For example, the technical implementation of the physical lock-and-key-based parental control mechanism had to relay the position of the lock through the computer’s hardware into the computer’s software and, depending on the lock position, disable or enable specific computer hardware and software functions. This, in turn, drove the engineering requirements of the components and technologies involved in the implementation.
Later a user-centered product design team was established in Shanghai and ownership of the product development was transferred to it. Chinese computer vendor Founder was engaged to brand, produce and market the product. The product was awarded the China Design Excellence award in the fall of 2004.
Summary
People-inspired technology innovation increases the likelihood that a product or technology being developed will meet the needs and desires of actual users. As such, it is a risk-reduction technique that starts with understanding the needs and desires of real people and continues with working through an iterative creative process of defining user experiences and then translating that into actionable technical requirements.
Although technologists can simply be handed a technical requirements specification, there is tremendous value in involving engineers and technologists throughout the design process: from user research and observation to working with the user experience developers, because it instills a deeper appreciation of the reasons for designing the product and the resultant technology requirements. Using this process almost always leads to superior technology product solutions.
