Balancing Left-Right Bias in User-Centric Design Processes

The success of any product ultimately depends upon whether clients prefer, choose and use it. Understanding clients’ lives and mental models, therefore, is a prerequisite for product design. However, researchers and designers often overlook the second element – the organizational buy-in and strategic feasibility of the creative ideas. Market research and user-centric design starts to look less meaningful when excellent product ideas are not adopted by the institution. This failure can be credited to a lack of focus on addressing the left brain and right brain bias.

This Note discusses MicroSave’s Market Insights for Innovation & Design (MI4ID) approach to Concept Distillation and how it balances these biases in the product development process. It gives a glimpse of the approach through which MicroSave is able to engage business managers in design process and ensure ownership and feasibility of the product designed.