GDE 730

WEEK 11

Revealing Gaps, Targets and Audiences for a New Product or Service Idea 

This week's content is focused on understanding the marketplace and dipping into the gaps and opportunities to inform the design of your product or service.

The main question driving the week was:

 How can you ensure a business / creative idea is targeted and researched to maximise potential?

Lecture: Guest Practitioner — Dan Parry

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One of the key things when trying to build or launch anything successful is really just understanding your audience. It’s really about who are your customers? Who is your audience? What are they trying to do? What problems do they have? What do the first 100 of your customers look like? Where are they? Why are they doing what they are doing?

Dan Parry

This weeks lecture with Dan Perry, the digital strategist at Metier Digital discussed how to identify gaps, and go about finding your target market and audience.

Dan went into great detail about the plan to find your audience and how to go about marketing your product and service. He suggested a host of useful tools for analysing data to help information on the audience and to learn how to engage with them. One thing I really like about the lectures presented by Metier this module is they are concise, to the point, and give you a clear way to navigate and apply the information. Dan's suggestions really gave me a way to break down and look at the project and think about ways to assess the market and see what is going on in it and similar spaces.

Marketing is obviously very important and I think as designers since we're so excited about the actual production of products we don't really thing too much about the problems we are solving and for whom. I was reminded of the business design thinking course I took two years ago and how when you really think about the market and the audience it can give you valuable insights into the product design.

Dan also talks about the idea of giving value to your audience, whether it’s to do with content or the product you provide. Your product can really shine if it resonates with what peple are looking for and goes a great way to garnering trust and interest.

Workshop Challenge

CHALLENGE: How can you ensure a business/creative idea is targeted and researched to maximise potential? Select one of your ideas from the previous week and develop a clear business outline of your intended audience outlets for distribution or purchase. You may need to evolve aspects of the proposition, and ensure there is a clear objective for the next stages of development. Your output will include product development, research insights and production challenges; all of which will come together in the final week of this module. Upload the artefact and evidence of any development undertaken (this might also include brand names and approach to the product’s story), and include a one page report outlining research, insights and development challenges.

One of the aspects of my research that was suggested by Paul in our tutorial was to have an interview with a professional in the field and get their thoughts on The Visual Quran project. I spoke to a prominent Islamic scholar from the US—Sheikh Mohammad Elshinawy—he worked with Upon Faith on the photographic Quran book: Joseph. 

Below is an excerpt video where he shares his thoughts about my project idea, and below that is the entire 20 minute conversation. The first part is mostly me explaining the project to him and the second half is him discussing his thoughts and ways he can help by being a production and knowledge partner and how he can help market the product in the Muslim community once it is realized.

For this week's workshop I decided to take two of my ideas from last week and merge them into one. I  want to create a visual interpretation of the Quran, the religious text of Muslims. I will do this by using experimental and expressive typography in both Arabic and English. The idea is to make God's word beautiful and provide modern audiences with a new way to connect to the 1400 year old book. Design authorship and visual interpretations will be mine, these experiments will allow me to connect with my personal interests in the area of type.

 

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Final thoughts and reflection

Initially when I went through the material this week, I got a bit stuck because it sounded so "businessey", in complete contrast to last week, where we were exploring designer as author. So I got stuck a bit on my initial idea because I couldn't see how it could possibly solve a problem for someone else as it is just stuff that matters to me. So I then looked a bit deeper and fused two of my ideas from last week to work on The Visual Quran. I think going through the creative block really helped in me looking further and refining the idea.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. 

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Week 10: Designer, Author, Maker
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Week 12: Development and Launch

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