Samsung Designer Community Research 

What
Research project to discover what content and features interior designers would find useful in a kitchen appliance focussed website 

When
Fall 2017 

My Role
UX research lead

The Team
Eiko Kawano UX Director
Bruno Peres Product Designer
Dondy Razon Product Designer
John Davis, Account Director
John Zachariah Business Analyst

Challenge
Samsung had been pitched an idea to create a website and social hub for interior designers. The original idea was a Pinterest inspired network, in which designers could share lookbooks and colour swatch combinations. My job was to determine what opportunities there were to engage interior designers.

Process
I kicked the project off with a series of stakeholder interviews to determine what Samsung hoped to achieve. Next, I had to find some interior designers to interview. Luckily Tribal DDB network is vast, and friends and associates were asked to complete a screener questionnaire which enabled me to shortlist eight designers to interview. I selected designers to represent a cross-section of the discipline. From high-end residential designers to those working for developers on first-time buyer condos. One stipulation was they had to have worked on kitchen design as part of their job. Even with a disparate range of designers, many common themes emerged. We discovered that there was no point in trying to replicate existing services, but there was a need for CAD block downloads and reliable measurements.   

Outcome
Samsung saved time and money, avoiding a costly build of a site that few designers saw the need for. Instead, they could focus on opportunities in which there was a gap in the market. 

Sample pages from Discovery Findings

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