Lextant Corporation: Design Research at Its Best

These days, competition is fierce. It's no longer possible just to make a product and hope that it sells; products must be designed with end users in mind. Lextant Corporation provides design research for its business customers, including PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, Motorola, Goodyear, Whirlpool, Microsoft, and Hard Rock Café. Its name comes from the word lexicon meaning a "vocabulary or language"-in this case, a language of consumers. The privately held Columbus, Ohio-based company strives to translate this language into actionable insights, equipping its clients to design for the motivations, behaviors, and desires of their customers. Lextant was founded with one fundamental goal-to help companies achieve a sustainable competitive advantage by understanding their end users and by designing products to satisfy them.

To achieve this goal, Lextant examines what motivates and drives people and presents this information to its clients so that they can make informed decisions about the products they are designing. Lextant brings together teams of experts in psychology, sociology, anthropology, human factors, industrial design, and interaction design, and it combines ethnographic, participatory, marketing, behavioral, and usability research techniques to provide tools to make products better.

Then researchers learn from consumers by following them in everything they do in their environment. Finally, researchers design systems that will yield the desired results for the firm's clients. Lextant researchers discover what end users want by getting a broad view of people and trying to know and understand them, often by observing them in their own environment. They understand the importance of observing people actually using the products being studied in their place of use. It is important in this process to really listen to end users when they explain what matters to them. Lextant has two approaches for collecting data.

The first is qualitative-through the context and environment of the user. The second is quantitative-based on what the client wants. The quantitative approach involves presenting prototypes of a product to a sample of end users. These clients then use the sample product and give feedback on what they like and don't like about the product, as well as suggestions on how the product could be improved. In some cases, Lextant uses focus groups to discover information for its clients. Researchers bring people together at a central facility to use and test the product and provide feedback about its design, color, and ease of use.

This method is especially useful when budget or time is limited because it permits researchers to gather information at a central location in a short time and results in instant feedback. Once researchers have collected the data from various sources, they are often confronted with an overwhelming amount of data. They must analyze the data to find the patterns and recognize anomalies that occur in only a few cases. Researchers use affinity diagrams and Post-it Notes stuck to the wall to help the process flow. By having Post-it Notes labeled with each important characteristic, it is easy to move the parts around until the relevant story becomes clear.

By having many pictures of the users and the environments in which a product is used, it is possible for any person in the organization to come into the room and understand the consumers: their personas, attitudes, and motivations. Employees at Lextant immerse themselves in the information that they gather to evaluate which information is relevant while at the same time discarding useless information. It is then possible to see where people say similar things and to focus on those and find out what is wrong with certain products. Clients of Lextant are often surprised by the findings of the Lextant team, especially when it comes to identifying ways that they can modify their existing products to better satisfy end users.

For example, Lextant helped Hard Rock Café to answer the question, "Is our website experience helping or hurting our brand?" Indeed, its website was challenging to navigate and was sapping online sales. Lextant helped the restaurant chain develop an easy-to-use, compelling website to help rejuvenate the legendary brand. Lextant researchers examined the Hard Rock website from the customers' perspective, documented the user goals and ideal experiences, and then developed an architecture that facilitated desired activity flows. The research firm created a complete prototype featuring an intuitive café locator, personalization features, and a streamlined shopping process.

This enabled Hard Rock to corroborate and refine site concepts before making significant investments in implementation. Lextant provides a business product that has a derived demand from producing products that delight consumers. Design research is not about the what but rather the why. If you understand why people do not like an existing design, then it is possible to design a new solution.

Questions for Discussion

1. Why is the Lextant product a derived-demand business product?

2. What types of business markets does Lextant serve?

3. When purchasing Lextant services, what type of buying method would be used: description, sampling, inspection, or negotiation?