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Case, Lenovo
How might we shift the way people shop the largest catalog on Earth?
#innovation
#design_thinking
#consulting
#rapid_prototyping
#hardware
#2015
#design_thinking
#consulting
#rapid_prototyping
#hardware
#2015
We employed Human Centered Design to generate innovation pathways that drove a landmark partnership between Lenovo and Amazon’s Alexa platform.
In the Spring of 2015, Amazon’s Alexa had only been on the market for six months, but it had already become a ubiquitous piece of coutertop decor in over 12 million American homes. Still mostly limited to playing songs, setting timers, and accidentally purchasing 60 hand soap refills instead of sixteen, the Alexa platform had undeniable potential to create new kinds of experiences. It was also a net-new shopping modality with unforeseen commercial potential, but we’ll get to that later.
Jad worked with Lenovo’s Chicago-based Product Innovation group and a team of Design Thinkers at Manifest to: Reimagine how soon-to-be-released hardware could work with Amazon’s Alexa technology to create an explosive partnership opportunity.
Our first move was to visit hallowed ground—IBM/Lenovo’s Innovation Lab and convene an initial empathy and ideation session with creatives, writers, technologists, futurists, UX-ers, hardware designers, and passionate Alexa fans. We embodied theoretical personas and interviewed actual Alexa users to establish an understanding of ways Lenovo and Alexa might meet previously unmet needs in their lives and enrich their daily experiences.
But ideas are just the raw material. Often this is where teams stop: they generate a glut of notional ideas, sort them according to their leader’s preference, then marvel at the wreckage that ensues when reality comes crashing down. The reality of how businesses work, how people buy or interact, or (and especially) how the magic of technology can or cannot make an idea real.
That’s why we focus and filter—prioritize against more than just Desirability (the right place to start), but also Feasibility and Viability. Is realizing this idea even feasible today or tomorrow? Is this idea somehow viable to the business or, in this case, businesses?
Working with Lenovo Product Owners, Jad and the team shortlisted ideas that satisfied deep desires in Users, were reasonably attainable through existing or emergent technology, and provided unique business propositions. That last part was especially important, because Lenovo had been suddenly invited to share these concepts directly with Jeff Bezos, 72 hours from that moment.
Jad and team got to work prioritizing, prototyping, and creating presentation materials to share at Amazon’s HQ in Seattle.
Some concepts were simple to illustrate and test with our co-creators, and would therefore be pretty straightforward to explain to Jeff (we’re not actually on a first name basis). But one idea stood out—because it was so attractive to our testers, and because it represented creating a net new shopping method, allowing people to shop Amazon’s catalog in a compelling new way—and the team decided only a video could truly show this idea as richly and completely as it demanded.
An Art Director played DP, and Jad tapped Firmcore to add motion graphics for this Virtual Shopping video concept (also below), which netted an in-room handshake agreement and proved to be the basis for Lenovo’s Works With Alexa relationship.
The Lenovo + Amazon innovation sprint was...
> Performed using Design Thinking techniques
> Co-created with actual customers
> Executed over 10 days
> Able to generate ideas that still live today
> Culminated in a quick-turn video prototype
* I am almost certain that Amazon would take issue with this assertion, but that’s Innovation doing its thing.
→ This project took place while James ran the Creative and Design groups at Manifest, where Lenovo was one of our most exciting ongoing clients. James headed up the project, directed the POC, and created all final materials.
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