Our paper – held jointly by our own Katrin Krüger (Senior Project Director) and the wonderful Electrolux client Jessica Adel (Consumer Insights Director, Electrolux AB Europe) – was a case study showing how the interplay of Virtual Reality and classical qualitative approaches worked successfully to deliver powerful usability and design insights in the area of white goods.

AGILITY AND MORE

The paper highlighted numerous benefits of working with virtual prototypes. These included flexibility – not just in terms of optimising prototypes quickly, but also how it freed up designers’ mindsets. Having a physical prototype binds designers more tightly to “their baby”, whereas with virtual renderings there was a greater openness for improvements.

The research also demonstrated that the approach works across age groups, including more mature cohorts.

Insights on quality – materials and colour for example – were also possible, especially in the focus group sessions that followed the VR interaction.

VALIDATION

Confirmation that this type of approach is worth pursuing more broadly came from the subsequent wave of research, a quant-validation module, where the item optimised (a fridge-freezer) outperformed the best-in-class competitor on key metrics.

In summary: we’re proud – and happy 😉 – to be selected as the winner amongst what leading MR online portal marktforschung.de described as “top-class competition”.

If you’d like to find out more, please get in touch.

*The General Online Research Conference – happens annually and has been running for over 20 years. In 2020 it was held virtually for the first time ever.