Team: UX Design / Research

Role: Craftsmanship Regional Lead (Perceived Quality)

Location: Monterrey, N.L., Mexico & Benton Harbor, MI, United States

BACKGROUND

At Whirlpool, Craftsmanship took three main aspects into account: aesthetics, functional and sensorial perceived quality. In other words, we look at quality as far as how it’s perceived by our consumers.

BIGGEST CHALLENGES

One of the biggest challenges is turning something that’s constantly seen as something “subjective” into objective quantitative information. Translating a studied and trained perspective into numbers conformed a big part of my work. After numbers have been set, the next big challenge was convincing the team to make the proposed changes, since every change requires an investment. Showing tangible advantages in revenue that the investment on detailed aspects in our product might bring was also very complex, but was requested from influential decision-makers within the team. Especially this last point helped me develop strategies for prioritizing certain aspects of the product over others. This prioritization came from user research, along with my assessment of the data and the product.

OVERCOMING CHALLENGES THROUGH STRATEGY

My experience at Whirlpool gave me a critical eye for products, not only could I easily spot design, engineering, and manufacturing defects, but I developed strategic thinking, with a refined need-based approach. I realized one of the major challenges to improving the product was modifying the company’s culture. Perceived quality was seen as a “nice-to-have” instead of a “must-have”. With the purpose of illustrating the impact perceived quality has on today’s users, I gave training on the aspects users valued the most depending on the product and possible small changes we could make that could have a great impact with no significant impacto on cost or time. As part of one of the exercises to understanding today’s users I tried to make participants think like users themselves and pick between a series of sets of two toys.

MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Execute benchmarking, evaluate products throughout the entire product development process and communicate the results and recommendations, or possible solutions, to the team.
  • Conduct and participate in user research to have better knowledge of our users and their expectations of the product.
  • Coordinate and train Craftsmanship auditors in every plant in Mexico to evaluate current production.
  • Spread Craftsmanship awareness through training members from Design, Marketing, Engineering, Manufacturing teams.

USER TESTING AND RESEARCH