Validating Industrial IoT Value Propositions and Digital Prototypes

Evaluating a products value proposition by understanding ‘boots on the ground’ needs

Case Study

How might we validate technology across a complex, international stakeholder ecosystem?
 
Our customer has elevators ascending in some of the most iconic buildings in the world, including the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, and the Burj Khalfia. Eager to keep a foothold of their market share, our customer identified a market opportunity to develop a low cost connected elevator that has the potential to provide accessible, predictive maintenance and analytics to current and future customers.
 
Our customer’s internal innovation team / R&D Lab, asked MO Studio to support their team and to supplement its continued efforts bringing of a minimal viable product (MVP) to life. The team kicked off the project with a full day immersion with our customers engineers, designers, and strategists to develop initial ideas for a research plan and testing protocol, including the establishment of research personas, identified targets and elevator locations.
Armed with an initial blueprint, MO Studio developed a research plan for use in several US regions and across Europe, capturing feedback on the value proposition, key benefits and features, user experience of the new technology offering, and the ultimate pain point it addressed. User testing was first conducted in Paris, feedback was used to inform the development partners design, the prototype was iterated on, then an additional round of user testing was conducted in the US.
 
Insights were uncovered using different techniques including card sort activities, discussion prompts, feedback tools, photography shot lists, prototype testing tools, and survey questions that were translated into quantitative analysis. As a team, MO Studio along with our customer synthesized findings into different frameworks and decision making tools to guide design and executive decision making. The outputs included insights, opportunities, stakeholder ecosystem maps, customer journey map with associated pain-points and brights spots, customer personas, and a decision making framework to prioritize value propositions, key features and benefits.
 
MO Studio made strategic recommendations and created executive summaries of the findings for different levels of leadership. The recommendations and report was used to inform executive discussions on how to use limited resources to best solve customer problems. The project was moved forward after our engagement and the prototype was further developed into an MVP and eventually rolled out in a pilot prior to going to market.
 
“If service providers communicate me, then they will better understand and be able to address my needs.”
– User Research Participant / Building Manager