The NEEDS INNOVATION Model (c)

Innovation, Exceptional Experience and Sustainable Success Made Easy: The NI? Needs Innovation Model by Johannes Robier

Keywords: Innovation · Design · Thinking · User Experience · UX Toolbox · Customer Experience

The NI? Needs Innovation Model is a structured customized approach for product and service development.

Is it magic or a jack of all trades? The Needs Innovation Model can best be understood as a combination of various established concepts, models and maps, aiming to provide a holistic and reliable way to achieve long-lasting success on the market. The NI?Model was created to help practitioners gather and assess a comprehensive set of customer needs, thereby determining the critical areas for improvement. In order to identify customer needs and oppor-tunities for value improvement the NI?Model analyses the “Main task & the surrounding journey” that customers are trying to get complete when they use products, services or interact with a company.

The Model

The seven steps of the Needs Innovation Model are defined as follows:

1. Specify the market and the problem
2. Elicit all needs along the journey in a qualitative research
3. Quantify needs and ask for satisfaction, importance, KPIs and emotions
4. Create the ?Needs Prioritization Matrix“ and determine the needs with the highest impact and value
5. Create, iterate, draft and design solutions
6. Evaluate your new solutions through the previously defined KPIs
7. Design structured experiences building on the emotions/satisfaction map

We deployed this model to speech processing systems and redesigned the Philips LFH 9600. It is a high-end device for quality voice recording. Since competitors released new products, Philips had to follow and innovate as well. Through the consequent redesign according to the NI? Needs Innovation Model, Philips achieved an increase of more than 10% market share on a global basis with the new Philips DPM 8000.

Furthermore, the model was put into practice to develop, evaluate and optimize a new product for Dewetron, a market leading provider of test and measurement systems showcasing state-of-the-art data acquisition instruments & solutions. Together with Youspi a new multitouch analyzing soft-hardware combination called “Trendcorder” was developed. This product was awarded by NASA as the product of the year 2014 within the industrial sector.

To better illustrate the NI? ?NEEDS INNOVATION MODEL“, the individual parts of the model are explained below with examples from the Philips DPM 8000 redesign process.

NI? ?NEEDS INNOVATION MODEL“ used at Philips DPM 8000

2.1 Specify the market and the problem

At a beginning of every project the first step is an interdisciplinary workshop, where the market and the user group for the envisioned re-designed product are clearly defined. In the case of Philips the follow-ing targets were set:

– Optimize the experience for the actual user – Enable Philips to enter a new market of analogue voice-recording users – Driving market growth within the displacement market – Create and integrate 3 core innovations within the redesigned product

Philips LFH 9600

It is paramount for the targets to be precisely defined as a first step as this creates the foundation the NI? ?NEEDS INNOVATION MODEL builds up on. With unclear targets, true optimization cannot be achieved, regardless of the effort.

1.2 Elicit the needs along the journey At the beginning the initial user journey for every target group has to be specified in order to define unique user groups for observation and in-depth interviews.

In the case of Philips, Youspi visited lawyers and doctors around Aus-tria and was able to obtain a comprehensive list of various actual

needs associated and clustered to the recorder journey. The qualitative study included key stakeholders from 5 hospitals, 5 private doctors, as well as 10 lawyers from different company sizes and their transcription-ists.

All interviews and observations were completed within a 3 week time frame, during which the user input led to valuable insights, in turn ena-bling Youspi to thoroughly optimize the entire journey.

Recommended methods at this stage comprise in-depth interviews, ob-servations, or daily diary entries. This step is one of the most crucial ones throughout the presented process.

Combined with a service blueprint, the needs customer journey map is a tool to evaluate the internal processes.

In the case of Philips, the customer journey was defined through a qual-itative user research and completed with internal workshops for the ser-vice blueprint. For C-level management qualitative research is often not

sufficient, which is why it was decided to quantify the needs of our re-search studies with 10 times the number of people in our qualitative study.

1.3 Quantify needs As a next step, a large-scale interview phase throughout a time span of three additional weeks was initiated to gather further intelligence for Philips. For the interviews a survey was prepared, which collect-ed

─ Satisfaction degree

─ Importance

─ KPIs

─ Emotions

for all clustered needs.

Each interview conducted in this step will last for about two hours and will gather key information on Satisfaction, Importance and Emotions for all needs, which is indispensable to create the Need Prioritization Matrix. The identified Users KPIs are employed to evaluate the optimi-zation of the process at a later stage and are of prime importance for the needs prioritization. This is a great possibility to quantify and prove Usability & User Experience!

1.4 Create the Needs Prioritization Matrix and determine the needs with the highest potential

The ?Needs Priorisation Matrix“ shows all needs with the potential for innovation. Simply put, this means that a high importance and lower satisfaction rate indicate a noteworthy potential. At this stage, a third layer, shown as size and color of a circle will be introduced, represent-ing emotions, which will ultimately allow you to determine the innova-tion potential.

It may be possible that some needs have a high satisfaction rate and score low in importance (right graphic area), which enables a possible reduction in functionality or service quality. In fact, reducing unneces-sary innovation to create space and simplicity can be a prime way of creating and conveying the added value to the target user, making the product of service itself easier comprehensible, more usable and conse-quently more attractive for the end-user.

The third dimension “emotion” provides an additional key evaluation possibility on top.

This model thence allows you to concentrate on exactly those needs that exhibit a high acceptance level. In case of the Philips DPM, one prime need for the analogue user was ?DATA SECURITY“. Users connect a tape with reliability and trust, knowing that their spoken words will be archived and will thence always be available, which is not possible through usage of a digital device. In addition, they know that the recording is happening through looking at the turning tape and thus have a visual input they may be lacking with a digital device.

1.5 Create, iterate, draft and design solutions for the needs with the high-est potential

The next step in the NI? ?NEEDS INNOVATION MODEL is to cre-ate, iterate, draft and design solutions based on the previously identified needs with the highest potential.

For Philips, Youspi now started its creative processes to define and vis-ualize all defined needs with the attempt to find new technical and User Interface solutions.

At the iterative development process Mock-UP testing, ergonomic test-ing and usability optimization testing was included to achieve the best possible solution.

1.6 Evaluate your new solutions with the defined user KPIs As a last step in the usability testing the pre-defined user KPIs were tested and evaluated. The results were outstanding. For the medical use in hospitals the process duration of two days was compressed to a few hours, showcasing a huge innovation in the working process.

Needs Feature Matrix by youspi

During the entire development process all functionalities were checked according to the needs in the previously created needs feature matrix. The needs and functionalities were thence prioritized so the reasoning for the specific design of various processes became clear for all stake-holders. The most important needs had to match the most important features, while being as intuitive as possible.

1.7 Design experiences building on the emotions/satisfaction map While the main product, process or service is being redesigned, much more experiences on the base of the ?Potential Feeling Map“ can be created. Unspoken Needs or less important needs can be complied with fast and easy, while creating additional surprising experiences along the whole customer journey. Such experiences clearly can also be created on the basis of big data. When clustering and combining different target groups, similar needs can be identified, ultimately leading to a tremen-dous target group.

Experiences may include the following :

• Simple first-use user manual
• First-use wizard
• Optimized service delivery

3 Conclusion

The NI? NEEDS INNOVATION MODEL provides the tools and a structured process to design, develop and optimize customized products and processes along the entire customer journey.

Given the fact that the NI? NEEDS INNOVATION MODEL relies on both quantitative and qualitative data and is optimizes products, ser-vices and processes to suit their exact target audience, end users will showcase very high acceptance rates. At the same time different types of innovations can be achieved based on various identified user needs.

In the case of Philips the following innovations were created:

Emotional Innovations

• Analogue Design
• First-Use Wizard / Olympus User & Analogue & Non User
• Product Design

Functional Innovations

• New scanner tool
• Improved noise-canceling
• Automated switching of microphones

Process Innovations

• Optimized process duration compressed from 1-2 days to a view hours
• Direct transfer to external transcriptionist

The procedure and method proved us right where the market was grateful. Within the first six months, Philips achieved a worldwide market share in-crease of more than ten percent, with further market gains in the subsequent years.

Youspi Consulting Gmbh,

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