Guiding R&D on a personal care device from use at home

The question

A personal care company had a new device in development, and its R&D team wanted to know where to focus its next round of work.

The team asked what women want from a device like this, and how this one performed in the middle of real beauty routines. The answers had to guide two kinds of work: improvements to the device in hand, and product development further out.

Our approach

Women used the device at home and filmed it, from first reactions to where they kept it afterward, so the team saw first use as it happens.

The women who had put their experience most clearly into words and pictures during the trial were invited into co-creation, where they built ideas for the device and the experience around it, with alternative devices and heads to handle.

Colleagues from the client’s marketing and research teams watched the co-creation sessions as they ran, hearing the women’s reasoning firsthand.

What the team came away with

A final presentation brought the home trial and the co-creation together for the R&D team, in one place.

It covered the device in use in women’s homes, seen through their own films, and the ideas they had built in co-creation, so both halves of the brief sat side by side in the women’s own words and pictures.

With both in front of it, the team could look at its device through first use, in the routines it had to fit, and weigh the improvements in hand against the longer-term development the women’s own ideas pointed toward.