Motorola

Research and Design in Controversial Spaces

Presentation slide: photo of someone sketching mobile wire frames on a desk with colorful sticky notes and pens scattered around.
STEFANI BACHETTI Motorola Solutions Research within public safety and law enforcement in America highlights important issues and considerations for designers and researchers. Within this industry exists controversial points of views and high stakes consequences. How do we as researchers balance empathy in spaces where points of views don’t just differ, but actively clash? Who should we consider to be our true users within a product life cycle, and how do we ensure we are designing for the future rather than the present state of the world? This PechaKucha surfaces some of the strategies employed by the research and design teams at Motorola Solutions in a holistic effort to navigate these challenges. Photo credit: Motorola Solutions Stefani Bachetti is a designer and researcher. She oversees the foundational and generative research practice at Motorola Solutions, which infuses human centered insights into the development of products that support people through their most critical moments. She pursues research with unquestionable...

Engineers “On The Ground”: Mass Observation at Moto

by STOKES JONES, PREE KOLARI, Motorola CXD   Of course, EPIC has always been a ‘community of praxis’ (as much as practice) helping attendees put what they learn into action. For us at Motorola Mobility, 2013 was no exception. The company had reduced its phone portfolio to a handful of products; and knew the only way to grow market share was expanding sales outside the US. But we had not done ‘front end’ research outside American shores since 2009. Likewise, most of our newly hired designers, product managers, and software engineers had never created phones for any geography but North America. So how could we “sensitize” whole teams to the differing desires & needs of people in Brazil or India? And how could we flush out those devilish details which we didn’t yet know we did not know...the ones that make the difference between a product being “just right” vs. “totally wrong” in a new environment? We decided lone report-writing researchers could not bring product teams in tune with our “next...