Samsung
Galaxy J Prime-series - Feature set
Summary.
I was lead UX designer for Samsung Galaxy J-series’ second iteration. Coming up with features that would make sense in the low-end market.
I got to do proper user research with ethnography and focus groups in India with the actual potential users.
I also worked closely together with R&D and the entire engineering team to actually make the features happen.
Forbes calls one of the features ‘Sublime’: Read about it here.
“This was the phone we designed the features for.
The phone’s price was around 60 USD and the brief told us not to increase the Bill of Materials for more than 1 dollar”
The team & my roles.
1 Project Manager, 1 Design Lead (me), 6 User Researchers (one of them, me), 4 UX Designers (me again), 1 Design Strategist, 1 Visual Designer, 2 Front-end Developers, 2 video/motion graphic designers (still me as one of them).
This project lasted 6 months with approximately half of the time spent in Delhi and Bengaluru.
The project can approximately be divided to four phases.
Phase 1: Sacrificial concepts.
Keeping everything within the budget and BOM costs we created approximately 100 concepts and small drawings that approximately looked like this to accompany them. We then voted within the team and the client’s team which 30 would go to the next phase as discussion pieces.
“This is my concept drawing. I think my rickshaw looks good”
Phase 2: User research in India
Take 1 UX designer from Samsung, 1 project manager, 1 lead designer, 4 user researchers, put everything on to a plane to India. Invite 2 more user researchers from TNS Global to join. Serve with momos.
Take your crew to meet Indian tech experts and and do a focus group session with them and lead users. Use the same props and discussion pieces (30 sacrificial concepts, magic device drawings and circle of influence) to practice on them before heading out to meet the consumers.
Go shopping. Visit multi-brand electronic stores, small ‘mom-and-pop’ vendors and Samsung flagship stores. Interview the staff to get a feeling what type of people buy what type of phones and what their main wishes and concerns are.
Shadowing in the city
We spent 2 weeks in people’s homes, schools, workplaces and places of worship in Delhi and Bangalore (I was in Bangalore). Shadowing them around the town going to bars, temples and schools trying to see if there are any elements that we can extract for discussion.
Props and discussion
After each shadowing session, we took the people for a coffee or dinner and with few props invigorated the discussion.
We gave them an opportunity to map their circle of friends and family in the ‘My People’ sheet.
We used a ‘Magic Device’ prop with which we made our users to draw and describe their fantasy device. Not a phone, not a watch, just whatever device they could come up with to help in their daily lives and improve communication in the circles in what drew in ‘My People’
Yield: 14 shadowing sessions, 11 ‘shop along’ sessions, 2 lead user focus group workshops, 2 tech expert workshops.
Archetypes & research synthesis.
Collect all your consumer research, shop along sessions and focus group discussions and combine with quality desk research. Make sure that the desk research is fresh. You should now have a solid synthesis report including archetypes that you can pit your designs against and general themes with insights that your designs should fall in.
Yield: 1 synthesis report, 4 user archetypes.
Phase 3: Concept design
Take the synthesis report created in the previous phase. Carefully extract the archetypes and themes and put them in a bowl with your sacrificial concepts. Mix all together with 4 UX designers, 4 workshops in 2 Samsung R&D centres with 50 enigneers.
Your concepts should start to make sense now.
We did wireframes, experiential prototypes, service design blueprints, 3D illustrations, high-fidelity concept drawings. You name it, we did it. These were all done with Samsung’s engineers to make sure the concepts are doable within the time, budget and BOM costs.
Yield: 10 concepts.
Phase 4: Concept refinement
Take your front-devs out. Throw them in a bowl with yourself, a visual designer and a junior UX designer. Make every concept shine like a diamond. Travel to India for 8 focus group sessions and nail your final three concepts. Create 3 highly-polished walkthrough videos of the concepts.
Conclusion.
One of the insights led to the creation of a security feature that a lot of users had already downloaded by themselves or wanted to have. We just made it a part of the operating system so it is easy for users to access and secure their files.
This feature is now on all Samsung phones and can be found under the name of ‘Secure folder’, but it all started with the J-series and one haphazard user who kept passport photos on his phone.
Below left, the concept and on the right the execution on my Samsung phone.
