Building a product starts with listening

Apr 30

2 min read

Updated: Sep 10

I believe that, just like in cooking, creating something good comes down to two things: understanding who you are creating it for, their tastes, preferences, and needs, and choosing the right, high-quality ingredients.

I can say that these two aspects became our main milestones for April: getting to know the people we were designing for better, and selecting the best “ingredients” for our product, in our case, electronic components!

At that time, I still didn’t feel that I had listened enough.

Even after a master’s thesis, questionnaires, focus groups, interviews, scientific papers, and countless articles about Parkinson’s, I still felt there was more I needed to understand.

Parkinson’s is incredibly complex, and at a time when, for some people, what I was doing already seemed fully validated, while for others it did not seem validated at all, I decided to dedicate more time to listening and to remain patient.

Arianna and I started conducting a series of interviews, refining our approach throughout the process. Some were with people who reached out to us thanks to the visibility we gained through the James Dyson Award, while others came through our collaboration with Associazione Parkinsoniani Treviso.

Even though this could easily have been a one-person task, it felt important that we were both present during those conversations, so that we could compare our impressions, talk about what we had heard, and understand it together.

Between the initial questionnaires and the interviews that followed, we collected around 70 responses from people with Parkinson’s, as well as input from several occupational therapists. We spent hours listening to their stories and trying to understand the everyday challenges they face when using a computer.

Sometimes these conversations confirmed what we already thought; other times, they completely challenged our assumptions.

Little by little, we learned about the symptoms of Parkinson’s not only through books and scientific studies, but through the words and personal experiences of the people living with them.

Every conversation taught us something.

In parallel with the user research, Fabio and I were focused on finding the right “ingredients”: the components of our product. We concentrated on identifying the components that best matched the requirements of our keyboard, together with the right suppliers.

We tested several options ourselves to evaluate their reliability, performance, and cost. At this stage.

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