How to survive in a vacuum of understanding of user needs

Scandit is a Zurich-based B2B software company who provides smart data capture solutions to over 1900 enterprise customers. Over the past few years, the UX team has strived for designing scanning solutions for smartphones that capture multiple product labels simultaneously and overlay product information using AR. While working on disruptive technology is an exciting opportunity for all UX designers, building a product that doesn’t exist in the market forces us to deviate from the conventional UX research process.

The most difficult challenge we have is that we can’t anticipate concrete requests or feedback from end users. Scandit’s target users are mostly identified as non-tech savvy, and they often do not formulate any specific problems or opinions about smartphone scanners. We can also not approach our enterprise customers to conduct user research either because asking them to play with a half-baked prototype might give them a false impression on our product before the launch.

Given this very unfavorable circumstance, how might designers survive from the lack of user evidence and design the innovation through the right assumptions? In this lightning talk, Julien and I will introduce some creative approaches to conduct the foundation research.

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