Empathic Lead Users: The Effects of Extraordinary User Experiences on Customer Needs Analysis and Product Redesign

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of empathic lead user analysis for uncovering latent customer needs that could lead to breakthrough product ideas. Empathic lead users are defined as ordinary customers (or designers) who are transformed into lead users by experiencing the product in radically new ways, via extraordinary user experiences. These extraordinary experiences may include modifications of the usage environment or the way in which the customer interacts with the product. A procedure for designing and conducting empathic lead user interviews is introduced in this paper. Results are reported for a trial study in which the empathic lead user technique is compared with verbal and articulated use interviews for a common consumer product (a two-person tent). Empathic lead user interviews are observed to have a significantly positive effect on latent needs discovery in the trial study, leading to a five-fold increase in latent needs discovery relative to articulated use interviews with a prototype and a twenty-fold increase relative to verbal interviews without a prototype. Empathic lead user interviews emerge as a promising tool for supporting innovation and breakthrough concept generation.

Decision theoretic modeling of affective and cognitive needs for product experience engineering: key issues and a conceptual framework

“…Instead of a business-oriented perspective, product experience engineering has its origin in designing products and services with an empathetic focus on the human users. This notion is consistent with user-centered design (UCD), which has been typically addressed in the fields of humancomputer interaction, human factors and ergonomics, such as emotional design (Fukuda 2011), Kansei engineering (Nagamachi 1995, and empathic design (Lin and Seepersad 2007). The UCD concentrates more on the functionality and usability aspects of products and emphasizes affective perception of the product use; but with little concern of how affect influences users' subjective experience as a whole.…”

Developing World Users as Lead Users: A Case Study in Engineering Reverse Innovation

“…Additionally, there are instances where mainstream users are situationally or temporarily impaired and perform as extraordinary lead users, such as navigating in the dark [22]. The needs of extraordinary lead users can be replicated by more ordinary users who are put in extraordinary situations [17,23].…”

“…While the concept and efficacy of lead users are established for developing products and systems, lead users are difficult to pinpoint in mass and may only highlight innovative concepts for niche or high-end products [17]. This may be due to lead users being associated with the obvious case of high performance relative to normal users, such as of marathon runners versus casual joggers [11,18].…”

The Prototype for X (PFX) Framework: Assessing Its Impact on Students' Prototyping Awareness

“…We found relatively little literature within engineering design that explored or incorporated into research in some way the desirability of a prototype and the effect on the end design. We found that the field of human computer interaction had the highest rate of papers related to a prototype's desirability [46][47][48][49] .…”

“…In order to understand prototyping at a deeper level and highlight the gaps in the prototyping literature, 46 papers were critically reviewed. We build upon Christie, et al 37 and Camburn, et al's work 14 by adding literature from engineering education 2,5,6,22,[38][39][40] , human computer interaction 9,27,34,41 , industrial design [44][45][46][47][48][49] , and design thinking studies 7,[50][51][52][53] . In the following section we use this literature to derive definitions for each of our prototyping lenses.…”