The resulting Next Generation Perkins Brailler is a sleeker and more modern take on an iconic device. At just 6.5 pounds (as opposed to the original, which weighed more than 10 pounds), the brailler is more portable, but still maintains a sturdy feeling.

Common advice suggests that when something isn’t broke, don’t fix it.

The Perkins Brailler – a product that’s been an iconic part of the blind community for more than 60 years – wasn’t broken, but Dave Morgan, general manager of Perkins Products, felt the time was right for a redesign anyway.

“The original Brailler is one of those few truly iconic products,” says Morgan. “The daunting challenge of a new design team is to celebrate what’s best in that classic product and modernize it in such a way that new users can get excited and adult users, maybe for the first time ever, would trade in and buy a new one.”

To minimize the risk of this major redesign, Morgan and his team worked with Product Development Technologies (PDT), a high-end product development firm based in Lake Zurich, Illinois.

As the economy starts to come out of the recession, companies reinvesting in new product development are skipping through some steps in the process in the rush to bring products to market. PDT takes a different approach, using a number of front-end research and product strategy techniques to help clients make products that provide real value to consumers in a time when money is tight.

Front-End Research & Product Strategy

Joel Delman, design director for the Los Angeles office of Product Development Technologies.

Over its 15-year history, PDT has worked in the medical field, high-end consumer electronics, and military electronics. Over the past few years, business has grown in the area of front-end research and product strategy, says Joel Delman, design director for the Los Angeles office of PDT. This involves defining a product or product lines through the processes of “informed innovation.”

The traditional model for product development is “a gut pull process that’s driven largely by management’s own knowledge base, or what they feel is their own knowledge base, and directing product development around that,” explains Delman.

In contrast, PDT uses a research-driven process, which uses ethnographic research to gain “real insight” from consumers and purchasers about the “genuine needs, opportunities, and challenges” there are for new products, he says.   

Although it would be overstating to say that the recession has drastically changed the product development process, Delman says that tighter budgets have heightened the understanding and appreciation of the importance of doing product development right.

PDT’s process starts “before you even pick up a pencil to start designing, to start figuring out what this product might look like or how it might work,” says Delman. “The way smart companies are doing it now is getting out and watching people who are genuinely using this stuff and finding out what they really need, as opposed to relying on what they say they do and say they need.”

Informed Innovation Research

PDT approaches their front-end research using a number of ethnographic techniques:

• Shadowing involves watching and videotaping, with permission, consumers use of a particular product or interaction with the environment in which a particular product is normally used. After asking questions related to what they observed, researchers review the tapes to identify and analyze the insights they’ve captured.
• Depth interviews are in some ways a more focused and evolved technique from traditional market research. Instead of gathering several subjects around a table, PDT engages carefully selected individuals – real purchasers and users of a particular product – to sit down and conduct a deep-dive conversation about their experiences.
• A final and most innovative technique is called journaling or workbooking. Delman says PDT uses this approach when they want to target groups they cannot be readily approached using shadowing or depth interviews, such as teenagers in a school setting, or individuals in distant locations. PDT sends each of the targeted users a digital camera and digital diary of carefully crafted questions and tasks for the subject. Subjects then upload their answers and photos to an interactive website where PDT designers can see their work and engage them with follow up queries.   

The Next Generation Perkins Brailler

Journaling was one of the research techniques used in the redesign of the Perkins Brailler, a Braille typewriter that transformed the world of Braille literacy when it was introduced in 1951.

Perkins Products, connected to the Perkins School for the Blind, has sold more than 330,000 Perkins Braillers to customers in more than 170 countries, but had never given the product a major redesign.

When Perkins Products decided to revamp the Perkins Brailler in 2005, General Manager David Morgan says the choice was tricky – the product was already successful, sales were at a record high, and customers were intimately familiar with every facet of the product.

Despite the product’s success, Morgan says when they reached out to customers, there were small improvements they felt were important, focusing on portability, usability, and modernizing the design.

Because the Perkins Brailler is used across the globe – 40 percent of braillers sold are used in developing countries – it was important to get feedback from both American and international users.

“This is clearly a case where we said, ‘This is absolutely necessary.’ We couldn’t afford to do it, but we did it anyway,” says Morgan.

Research was conducted in five different locations: Boston, Massachusetts; Indianapolis, Indiana; Mexico City, Mexico; Chennai, India; and Johannesburg, South Africa. PDT used both observation-based research as well as informal studies to try and gauge pleasing and appropriate aesthetics for people relying on senses other than sight.

“By seeing the reality of these people's lives, how the brailing device is used on a dirt floor … these are things we wouldn’t have known if we didn’t get this insight into these peoples’ lives in this fashion,” says Delman.

The Cost-Benefit Analysis

Using information collected from research and engineering analysis, the team at PDT conducted internal brainstorming sessions. They used tools like sketching and 3D sketch modeling to explore features and functions.

Morgan says he didn’t need to be convinced that investing in this type of research was a good idea. Unlike other companies, Perkins Products is a nonprofit, which meant Morgan was working with grant money to support product development.

Even so, Morgan says, “This was such an iconic product that we really believed if we didn’t do this, we completely risked the update. I had concerns we’d never make it to market.”

“I think the more iconic the product, the more absolutely critical it is to engage in thorough, systematic user research and update the design of the new product using that information,” he continues. “We have a 60-year history with a single product and would have ‘risked the farm’ by not doing user research.”

Delman admits there can be challenges to convincing management to invest money more heavily at the beginning of the development process, but that many of these techniques can be more cost-effective than you might imagine.

For example, the way PDT gathers information – anything from informally videotaping users for a couple weeks to three months or more of formalized research in a technical setting – can be done for far less money, and reap far greater insight, than traditional market research.

“Market-based research, on the other hand, adds up fast in terms of money because to get anything approaching valuable insights, you need to meet with lots and lots of people in lots of places,” says Delman. “The logistics of that and the expense of organizing it can be really massive.”

In the case of the Perkins Brailler, the team cut costs drastically by not traveling overseas to talk with international users.

“The nice thing about [journaling] is that it can be very inexpensive – we don’t have to travel, we don’t have to put people out in the field. What you’re doing is recruiting the right individuals, you’re sending them a package with a camera and a return mailer,” says Delman. “ “You may never meet these people in person, but you can still have incredibly valuable conversations with them online. It’s taking advantage of today’s technology in ways that allow our clients to do these things on more limited budgets."

The Next Generation Perkins Brailler

Morgan says he was also very invested in the design process because he wanted to help PDT understand the requirements for blind users and because he had a clear point of view of what he wanted in the redesign.

“The PDT team knew they weren’t experts in this product base, and the learning curve in the blindness space is huge, so they really have to rely on us having some vision of how we want to serve our customer,” explains Morgan. “We have finicky customers – they’ve had this product for 60 years, they have their own love/hate relationship, but they don’t want to see it change.”

Despite this vision, Morgan says the user research pointed out a number of features he hadn’t considered – an erasing feature, a tray on the back of the device to enable easier reading, and changes in shape to the control knobs all came out of user feedback.

The resulting Next Generation Perkins Brailler is a sleeker and more modern take on an iconic device. At just 6.5 pounds (as opposed to the original, which weighed more than 10 pounds), the brailler is more portable, but still maintains a sturdy feeling.

The keys have a lighter keystroke, making the new brailler easier for younger users and users that have difficulty typing. And a virtually indestructible polycarbonate shell in contemporary colors – “Raspberry” and “Midnight” – protects the metal frame and hundreds of internal parts.

The Next Generation Perkins Brailler was released on October 3, 2008 and has been selling steadily since.

When Morgan reflects on the redesign, he says one thing that impressed him was the way that simple research methods yielded the most useful results.  

“Sometimes the simplest approaches are the best,” he says. “They’re not loaded with statistics necessarily, they’re just powerful when you do a few dozen users in a range of situations and see how they respond, then tease all that information out and recompile it. It’s an amazingly powerful process.”

For Delman, putting in the initial work to do thorough research before you design a new product, although an added cost, is absolutely critical if a company is to continue producing products that provide real value to consumers who, in today’s economy,  are less likely to buy a new gadget unless they feel its going to add real value to their lives.

“By investing a relatively small amount up front to do it right, [companies have] ended up coming up with a product that targets their consumers perfectly,” Delman says. “It pays for itself in no time. To not make this kind of investment is the costliest mistake a company can make.”

For more information on Product Development Technologies, visit www.pdt.com. For more information on the Perkins Brailler, visit www.perkins.org.