Episode description

We’ve partnered with ProtoPie, the future of interactive product design, to help you navigate through uncertainty and overcome the challenges today's unprecedented conditions have brought to the industry. Join us for Season 2 - Designing for a new level of uncertainty.

If you are a digital designer you may be used to designing experiences for existing hardware your customers may use, such as a smartphone or tablet.

But how do you approach designing for an entirely new device?

How do you ensure both new hardware and the software on it meet customer needs and work together as a seamless experience? And how do you test this experience that’s been designed in the hands of real customers in the middle of a global pandemic?

Eduardo is a Senior Product Designer at Microsoft and was most recently involved in the development of the new Surface Duo and had to come up with different ways to respond to new customer needs due to the Coronavirus pandemic.

The Surface team sits at the interjection between software and hardware and involves both hardware and software engineers and designers. Eduardo talks to us about how these disciplines come together to create unified experiences for customers.

• How do hardware and software come together to form new experiences?
  
• How do you prototype experiences that involve hardware and software elements?
  
• What techniques can you use to test both hardware and software when there is limited access to users for usability testing given the Covid-19 restrictions?
  
• What teams and skill sets do you need to create these combined experiences?
  
• What challenges are there in testing hardware with customers during a pandemic and what research approaches can you use?
  
• How have customer needs around personal technology and home tech changed as a result of the increased time we are spending at home?
  
• How does a hardware and software team come together to make design decisions around the hardware itself?
  
• What things can you learn from users only when a product is post-release?
  
• How do you test for human factors such as neurology or ergonomics during the design process?
  

• Finish: Give yourself the gift of done - John Acuff