Dorel Juvenile is the world’s leading juvenile products company. When they wanted to develop a new infant car seat, they turned to Pennsylvania-based ID firm DesignThink.
DesignThink as the Innovation Incubator for the Ultra Lightweight Maxi Cosi Coral XP
A Cold January Day in 2017
The team at DesignThink was asked to visit Dorel Juvenile Group USA to review a “Special Project”. The development team at Dorel JG wasted no time introducing us to their latest infant car seat (ICS) project. They were experimenting with the idea of developing a seat that would reduce the struggles parents faced when trying to transition their baby from the car and carry their baby in the removable seat portion of the ICS. The team at DesignThink has designed several car seats over the years and we instantly recognized the unique opportunity, as well as the challenge that this project offered, and were eager and excited to get started.
Our Role as the Innovation Incubator
We partnered with Dorel to act as the innovation incubator to lead the project team through the fuzzy front-end and define the product’s overall features and characteristics of use. Upon successful concept definition, the project would be positioned under the Maxi Cosi brand and ultimately transferred to the Maxi Cosi team in Europe and a European design group to carry the innovation to production.
The Problem at Hand
By removing the seat from the base that is installed in the car, parents can take the baby with them while running errands or visiting people and places. However, a problem associated with this system is that some removable seats can weigh up to 16 lbs. and the baby can weigh up to 35 lbs. for a combined arm-crushing weight of 50+lbs.!!
We established two primary goals: 1) reduce the overall weight of the seat to lighten the load, while maintaining structural integrity as to achieve a top crash test rating, and 2) develop new methods that enable parents to more easily lift the seat when moving in and out of the vehicle and when transporting the child in the seat.
Our Approach (Decades of Experience and User Understanding Put to Test)
DesignThink is one of the leading firms in car seat development having brought several seats to the market and has a long history of creating break-through innovation, but this project pushed our team in new ways. The structure for the project utilized DesignThink’s simplified “DEEP” process;
Define that for which we will solve
Express possible solutions as quick thumbnail stories
Explain the “what – why – wow” related to user needs
Prototype to demonstrate the merits of the idea
How the Project Unfolded
A series of innovation workshops were hosted at our studio to enable the team to think and problem solve with product at hand. The objective was to think in the “ideal” (do not worry about cost and construction initially) and to “fail fast” (explore, evaluate, and evolve). The following provided the high-level framework for how the team identified and pursued their ideas.
Established Design Targets
Led by our usability team, along with team members from Dorel, we hosted a several day innovation workshop at our studio. We began with a collaborative defining of the design targets based on use, expectations, pain points, and opportunities, which we affinitized and moved directly into physical prototyping to address and evaluate how well the concepts improved the user experience during day-to-day interactions.
DEEP: Innovation Workshops to prototype your idea. You are encouraged to be chaotic and messy! Fail fast! Dorel made sure plenty of product was on hand to fuel the innovation.
Inutitive Carry
Enhanced Confidence
Improved Transitions
Development of Design Targets
Role-Play is the Best Way
To truly understand and empathize with users, we role-played, exploring typical use-case scenarios to inform our ideation. Placing ourselves in the same situations helps us quickly evaluate and improve our concepts.
Handle-Carry:
Evolution for improved ease when attaching the seat to the base and removing the child from the vehicle
Cradle-Carry:
Exploration to improve how parents can bond with the baby in a more natural holding position
Cross-Body Strap:
Exploration to provide alternate ways to carry the baby while reducing the effects of weight and fatigue on the parent
Iterative User Evaluation Cycle
Our early thoughts and ideas were evaluated by the team and with parents in our research lab. These ideas were then refined to strengthen the evolving direction. The learnings obtained through this method enabled the team to focus on the most meaningful directions and build their value. Listening, understanding, and empathizing allowed our team to develop new ideas in this category that were previously unexplored.
DesignThink presents the refined design direction.
A series of prototypes and user evaluations enabled us to reach a stage of concept definition for an ultra lightweight car seat that provides parents with improved ways to carry, hold, and secure their baby.
Our Results
User-Centered Insights lead to Market Defining Solutions
Having developed many juvenile products such as car seats, strollers, and highchairs, DesignThink understands the day-to-day challenges parents face, both physically and emotionally. We embarked on this project with Dorel to define a new car seat with features that take into account those challenges and offer relevant and meaningful solutions. Exploring innovation that is rooted in user insights enabled our team to quickly define those solutions and overcome technical hurdles to deliver new experiences to address real problems faced by parents when using an ICS.
Defining the Direction
As mentioned, DesignThink was hired as the innovation incubator in the fuzzy front-end to develop and define a new architecture for this seat. Our work was documented and handed off to the Maxi-Cosi team in Europe. The output of our innovation incubation became the driving framework used by the teams in Europe to create a truly meaningful and relevant solution for parents in this category.
The DesignThink team is very proud to have been selected by Dorel to play such an important “behind the scenes” role in setting the direction for, and contributing to the success of, the Maxi Cosi Coral XP.
It takes a Village to Design a Car Seat
Snapshot of the iterative concept development that led to the final product
You can see more of DesignThink’s work here.
