Landscape research
Zensors is a project that originated in academic research, now aiming to commercialize its core visual intelligence technology. When starting such a project, it’s important to be aware of the disconnected incentive structures between academia and industry; academia optimizes for publication and (intellectual) novelty, with business applications of the research generally only being considered superficially.
As part of this capstone project, we were now given such a project and told to explore how the Zensors team could go about bringing it to market. Having such an open problem space is both exciting (lots of opportunities!) and incredibly challenging (where do we even start?) at the same time. All of us had just spent the past semester learning to design from a user-centered perspective. We’d start with the customers, define their needs, brainstorm product ideas, and then develop a technologically viable solution that aligns with the identified needs.
In broad strokes, that traditional design process looks something like this:
But now we couldn’t start with the needs — we didn’t even know who our users were! We were given a technology and asked to identify which markets could be served by it, while simultaneously shaping the product through which this technology is to be delivered. In essence, our design process was turned upside down.
As you can see, it’s roughly the reverse, with some extra challenges thrown in. Now we had to start somewhere, so to get an idea of the direction and verticals we might explore we decided to conduct preliminary landscape research and use the data we gather to further refine our direction.
Besides being valuable in identifying direction, landscape research is also useful in foreshadowing potential saturation in target markets; you don’t want to jump into shark-infested waters in just your shorts, especially if you’re tasked with identifying an exemplary use case for your new technology — you want it to stand out. Landscape research gave us the metaphorical cage to go diving in; a quick and riskless peek into what is going on under the surface.
As an example, retail seemed like the most obvious vertical to start with, as all of us could come up with tons of relevant use cases. Usually we’d just focus on the user and kickoff the interviews, observations and contextual inquiries to confirm our hypotheses in this space. In this case, our exploratory landscape research showed that retail sensor technology is an incredibly saturated market, dominated by big players with massive warchests of venture capital. You know the money is there, but you’d have to pry customers away from your competitors (using expensive marketing dollars) in a market with no customer growth. Were we to go down this path, we’d likely be outcompeted before we even started.
Thorough landscape research took us just a couple hours and unearthed lots of other valuable insights. Conducting user research in just the retail space would, on conservative estimates, have spanned days.
Plug-and-play Computer Vision for your business
The core value proposition that Zensors makes to users is the ability to use the power of crowd computing and machine learning to use video and associated metadata to answer questions about any given physical environment or state. Imagine being able to ask a video feed any possible question. If you’re curious to explore what this could do for your business, talk to us!
