Organizations are divulging information and clarity to the customers like never before and inviting them to participatory product design. With the constantly changing customer displaying contradictory preferences when it comes to picking products companies are resorting to the innovative idea of involving prospective customers in co-creating the products or services instead of creating for them. In the process they are coming up with products and services that are compelling because they are pertinent: putting people first and giving them the opportunity to not only co-create but share their insights and voice their opinions.
Human-centered designs are dependent on people – their requirement, urges and behaviors that shape the product or service under creation. Participatory design methods allow this to happen even more directly, giving people the chance to suggest, ideate and create alongside designers, offering a glimpse into real customer needs that often remains inadequate by conducting traditional survey and focus group methods. One thing that needs to be kept in mind is that the design teams usually generate many ideas and the tricky part is to choose the most relevant and useful idea. The obvious solution is to ask those who are most likely to use that product.
Participatory design calls for creating goods and services in close cooperation with the customers and in the process their latent behaviors and desires comes forth which they otherwise would not have taken into account. This is much more than simply answering questions as the customers are being invited to actively participate in the design process and they not only get involved but also get an ideal opportunity to show case their talents and bring up new ideas which might or might not work but they get a direct say which leads the way to customer empowerment. Since the customers are not trained designers with a detailed understanding of design processes and methodologies, participatory methods use games, activities and visual aids to help them to express their thought and articulate their needs in a way that designers can understand. Above all, it is a cooperative process – designers are there, all they are doing is working with people, guiding activities, allowing customer needs and behaviors to emerge and putting together the ideas and desires and presenting them into visualizations, suggestions, prototypes, stories and patterns.
This kind of “outsourcing to the community” also allows people to develop a strong emotional bond with their creation – getting involved in the design, developing something that fulfills their needs and it can be concluded that the end product will meet their needs. This is where the real value of co-creation lies – by allowing multiple ideas to be generated and involved in the process, the final outcome is likely to satisfy a wide variety of customers.