The Right Choice with Design Differentiation
Design differentiation is vital to your business
As consumers and professionals, we make daily hundreds of decisions that require us to differentiate between products and functions. Often we make errors in these decisions because products and features are hard to differentiate - they look too similar.
Errors can range from a nuisance to fatal consequence costing anything from lives to expensive accidents or product recalls.
The image gallery shows some of the daily differentiation challenges we meet as consumers: from the super market to the home depot. From the restaurant to the medicine cabinet.
When the design is hard to differentiate we it can have consequences beyond recalls as users come up with strategies that protect against making errors (again). These “life-hacks” or mitigation strategies due to poor design differentiation can hurt your business in several ways.
In healthcare
Expensive recalls due to dangerous mix-up scenarios
Sub-optimal treatment due to wrong product choice.
Negative spill-over to other tasks due to high cognitive load.
Prescription of drugs drugs from different brands to avoid mix-up.
In consumer products
Product interaction errors (e.g., data loss data, wrong settings).
Poor user experience.
Purchase of wrong product.
Avoidance of brands.
Graphical differentiation that is not robust
A small example of graphical design used to differentiate between Metro check in and out stands in Denmark.
Click on video to see full resolution version of the design case.
Small animated preview of the video case.
Design differentiation services
We provide three kinds of services to help ensure superior and robust design differentiation:
Pre-project input
Differentiation design strategy based on our extensive expert knowledge of perceptual and cognitive design drivers of robust differentiation.
Expert review
Understand ways to improve your existing design differentiation strategy.
Root-Cause analysis of product mix-up incidents.
Differentiation testing with SDA
Our advanced human-factors test facilities provides you with a robust quantitative differentiation data profile.
Tests based on the well-established Signal Detection Analysis, SDA.
Design differentiation testing
Based on robust psychometrics, our human factors laboratory tests the discriminability of your product.
We measure reaction times and errors to provide a quantitative profile for each design. This provides you with a robust decision basis for your design strategy.
The test can be run both with real objects or graphical on-screen renderings. The latter allows for online testing.
Our testing setup is highly agile and can provide results within 8-10 business days.
Results can be benchmarked against internal design alternatives, competitor products or our reference database.
The graph depicts an example of reaction times and error rates of five different packaging designs.
Our testing setup is based on well-established human factor methodologies called signal detection and visual search.
Ready to learn more about design differentiation?
Then book a free one-hour presentation where we cover the basics of design differentiation and testing methodologies.
We can present online at any time convenient to you and your time - or we can arrange an on-site presentation.
The presentation will introduce your team to the underlying perceptual and cognitive mechanisms of differentiation design. We will present inspection tools that you can start to use immediately to inspect the quality of your design from a differentiation perspective.