Graphic Design | PGDPD
Immanuel Suresh
Hindustan Unilever, Mumbai
Keywords Research tools Consumer interaction Sensorial attributes
For my diploma project, I worked at Hindustan Unilever Ltd. (HUL), a leading FMCG multi-national company. The project brief was to “understand the key drivers and sensorial attributes to design the ‘just right’ product”. The scope of work was framed around in-depth consumer interaction in order to obtain insights and observations on product preferences. Here, a designer was perceived as a tool to probe and a medium to record and connect the consumer responses. This work profile became a background for exploring the need for design intervention.
In order to trace the sensory experiences generated by toothpaste, there was a need to design interactive, elementary and advanced tools to aid consumer research. While these research tools were developed for the formulation team members and managers of the oral care category at HUL, they were also designed to derive and plot consumer responses. The tools were designed in keeping with the functional concerns of the formulation team members (executor) and the cognitive concerns of the consumers (respondents).
Research design and product design were two important aspects of this diploma project. This pattern of progression helped me validate my research designs at an early stage and thus, I got an opportunity to capture the inputs from the product development team to re-work my research concepts.