Design Research: Giving You The Confidence to Commit

How confident are you that you know what your customers truly want?

Most organisations believe they have a clear picture, but the reality is often built on assumptions, internal opinions, or outdated market understanding. When those assumptions guide product development, businesses risk investing time, budget, and resources into something that doesn’t truly resonate once it hits the real world.

Bridging this gap between what teams think they know and what users actually need is where the difficulty can lie. However, by grounding new product development in real-world insight, businesses can make evidence-based choices that stand up to commercial pressure.

At Smallfry, we call this the confidence to commit. It’s the clarity that comes from evidence: uncovering and validating user needs, market gaps, and the value your product must deliver to succeed. Design research gives teams the power to move forward decisively, justify investment, and align stakeholders in a direction that’s based on reality and consumer insight, not guess-work.

When Consumer Insight is Missing: Barclays bPay

In 2014, Barclays launched bPay – a contactless payment wristband designed for quick transactions at events. Encouraged by early interest, the range expanded in 2015 to include fobs and stickers, aiming to replace physical cards with the convenience of tap-and-go.

But despite the strong branding behind it, the launch was less successful than expected.

Th Barclays team had overestimated the desirability of adding yet another payment device into people’s lives. Research later showed that UK users didn’t want a separate wearable just for payments. Instead, they preferred to have everything built into a device they were already carrying daily – a smartphone, for example.

As a result, when Apple Pay and Google Wallet gained momentum, bPay products quickly became redundant. Barclays ultimately withdrew the product range in 2021.

Smallfry’s Human-Centred Approach to Uncovering Customer Needs

At Smallfry, we ensure commercial success by diving deeper than market research. Our team use sophisticated techniques to deeply understand your target audience’s needs, wants, and behaviours to uncover invaluable design insights.

In the past, this has involved:

• Focus groups
• Workshops
• Consumer interviews
• In-home trials

Having generated consumer insights through these techniques, our unique ability lies in integrating them into our design process to deliver desirable products that resonate with customers, improve ratings, and ultimately drive organic business growth.

Smallfry – Design Based on Insight

In 2021, we developed the new HL5 Upright Vacuum Cleaner for Hoover – a once-iconic British brand name that had slowly morphed into just a verb to describe vacuum cleaning. Over the last few decades, the Hoover brand had become a distant memory to many consumers.

Therefore, Smallfry’s aim was to put Hoover back on the map. To achieve this, we put their consumers at the forefront of the process – using our design research to inform the design development process, and ultimately designing a 5-star rated vacuum cleaner.

“The process Smallfry applied to this project has defined the way all Hoover vacuums have been developed since and this can be seen in all of them having 4.5+ star reviews. The transformation of the brand has begun!”

Speak to our team to discuss validating your next product decision.