True Innovation
If Henry Ford would have asked people in 1908 how to improve their transportation situation, many would have responded “I need a faster horse.” The ability to provide truly breakthrough innovation is not solely based on the “voice of the customer” but rather a complex combination of immersive observation, objective qualitative research techniques, multi-disciplined creativity and a keen understanding of the latest technology and manufacturing techniques.

In the early 1970s Alex Bally was one of the first designers to introduce videography as an effective way to study the nuances between people, products, their applications and their environments. As a design research pioneer, Bally Design understands the importance of observational research and the need to look beyond just designing the product or the exhibit to designing a highly-valued customer experience. Breakthrough product development must be built on a solid foundation of market and user research, and yet it is this phase of the project that is most often short-changed. We feel it is impossible to produce truly world-class creative solutions without a deep sense of all the customer requirements.

Every design firm has a “research process” and many tout the use of ethnographic methods and the number of anthropologists they have on staff. For Bally Design, each designer and engineer is part ethnographer, psychologist, anthropologist and sociologist. Because of Alex Bally’s vision for research, our process allows us to understand and define complex and comprehensive design requirements by seeking to identify all the stakeholder interactions and the related functional, physical, cognitive, and emotional values at play. Through analysis of such complex data come integrated, simultaneous, elegant solutions which optimize each valued customer interaction.