Design Sojourn | Strategic Industrial Design Blog

Update 1: Oops sorry forgot to add. The Industrial Design 101 series are about my adventures of designing, creating, hacking and remodding my own brand of Cool Mp3 players.

I’m not a marketing expert here but when ever I consider a new design I always encourage designers to create “mood” boards or collect pictures that reflect the target consumers that will use or buy our product. Which is in this case our MP3 player concept.

I often don’t waste too much time writing down marketing details, thats the marketing department’s job. Here we just want pictures to give us a healthy understanding on our target consumer and allow us to get into their head to live a day of their life in their shoes.

Images thanks to lifeclever and FashionistaTV. The additional graphics are mine…

Update 2: Geekette has a cool female version of this fashion set!

Heh-heh, here are a few more to wheat your interests on the people I plan to target:

Thanks Nikita!

Thanks KK+!

Wow this is a great collection of images of my market all nicely done by Ben.
Thanks Ben!

I also like to run a collection of products that our target market will use as well. This completes the picture as it gives us an indication on how our target user lives his life. Really you are what you use.

Notice these guys are technology people, not geeks, but techno-philes. They appreciate design and are savvy enough to subscribe to well designed products (Sony PSP, Palm handheld, Crumpler bag, Jabra headset, Gameboy Micro etc.), even ipod.

Really the point here is that they subscribe to many different kinds of technology products. I also like their use of the old-school pen and note books. This to me means my target market prefers their product as a task specific and focused one. In other words they like to use a particular product that is the best of its category that best completes the task at hand.

Do stay tuned for ID 104: Engineering Functionality and Usability.

Update 3: I love blogging. Wendy Maynard from Kinetic Ideas has written a very cool extension on this discussion on techno-philes in her blog post on “Chic Geeks” here. Thanks Wendy!