Josh Haldeman is a modern-day inventor who straddles the line between passionate designer and disciplined engineer. His broad experience includes a degree at Ohio State followed by time spent at Index which later became Fisher Design. In 2000 he founded his own design consultancy, Terradise which became Element Product Design Studio. He has been faculty and Chair of the Industrial Design Technology program at Cincinnati State and continues to adjunct teach at DAAP. He has also been involved with IDSA for many years.
Josh recently left the E.D. Bullard in Kentucky. They invented the hard hat in 1919 and his work on a recent redesign is the subject of this piece.
Describe a project in which they practiced user-centered design
The project involved what’s called a Bump Cap which is basically a cheap disposable hat issued to visitors during factory tours, etc. It is not a real hard hat and only protects against light bumps, not actual impact. The company had redesigned it in 2009 which was a horrible market failure and they were losing market share. The project involved determining exactly why the hat was not selling and to redesign and retool for another run.
What user-centered design principles and methods did the designer utilize?
The project started with a broad survey of distributors concerned with why they were not using the hat. Rather than pick a random selection of end users, it was more efficient to go directly to distributors for their feedback. Since they met end users all over the country this provided a broad context. Bullard did specifically talk to Valvoline and Toyota users as well. They determined overall that the hat looked and felt cheap, it was very hard to adjust the harness, and it was just plain ugly.
Users were asked to assemble the harness and point out the pain points along the way. This observational ethnographic study was invaluable to making the design changes necessary. Design sketches were presented to a selection of clients and end users who picked the design they liked with input from regional sales managers.
Whom were the designers target audience? What was their gender, generation, culture, and profession?
The target audience was anyone who has a head in a nutshell. These are not professional end users like mechanics or engineers, but simply people who need a temporary helmet during a factory tour. They can also be used by some food service personnel and other light duty applications.
How did practicing user-centered design add value to the project as a whole?
The helmet was completely redesigned in Solidworks for manufacturing entirely by Josh Haldeman and is doing very well. It represented a growth of 1.1 Million in sales immediately. The new version was modeled after baseball caps and looks better in addition to being easy to adjust and comfortable to wear.
What are the key takeaways from this assignment?
Every design project involves user-centered research even it is as a simple as quick internet category audit. For a project like this one involving hundreds of thousands of dollars in new tooling it was imperative to figure out exactly what the pain points were with the current design by talking to end users.
Sources:
Josh Haldeman, Designer
Pyramexsafety.com