Conversations with corporate researchers

Liesbeth Wenzel 

Chief Design Researcher, Milwaukee Tool Corporation 

You received your BA in archaeological studies and a BFA in industrial design. How does this background help you in your role at Milwaukee Tool? 

Both have been extremely helpful in my career, as they both involve the study of how people interact with objects and environments. A big part of what we do as researchers is understand the whole context in which a task is being performed. At Milwaukee Tool this means observing the entire construction job site, understanding all the tasks being performed, interviewing all the stakeholders up and down the chain to understand the pressures and motivations for tool choice and behavior, etc. As an archaeologist I was trained to look critically at the spatial relationships of structures and artifacts on an excavation site and extrapolate what they meant in terms of the culture; this is essentially what I do every day on the job site. As a designer I was trained in design thinking, which to me is essentially the application of critical thinking to the product development process. It helps me bridge the gap between understanding what is going on under the surface of a job site and translating that into actionable insights that our designers and engineers can solve for.

For those outside our field, I explain my background like this: As an archaeologist, I studied the artifacts of the past to understand the culture of the past; as a design researcher I study the culture of the present to create the artifacts of the future.

Describe a time when you successfully used the design-thinking framework. 

Design thinking is all about reframing the problem – abstracting it to a place where new thinking can push the solution beyond what’s obvious. We are often asked to look at redesigning a specific tool – at which point our challenge back to the business is to broaden the scope to look at the task or job. The classic example in the power tools category is to move away from designing a better drill to designing a better way to make a hole. Every time we scope out a new project we go through an exercise of abstracting the ask and then narrowing it back down to constraints that are tight enough to give us a usable answer, but that also give us room to think broadly about the problem.

We recently designed a new concrete level at Milwaukee Tool. When we went out to research the topic, we started with very broad questions: “Who uses these tools? What types of applications do they use them on? What do they need to level?” Our research uncovered that many concrete workers use levels in a completely different way than we thought. This allowed us to reframe the project away from designing a specific tool to achieving the multiple jobs that tradesmen use the tool to accomplish. We then followed a typical design process: after ideating on ways to achieve those jobs, we created a range of features and created rough mock-ups to communicate the concepts physically. We took those mock-ups back out into the field with the goal not to design the perfect level but to understand which of the needs we identified were most compelling, and to more tightly define design criteria for specific features moving forward. After two rounds of research we had the design intent and user needs well-defined and moved the project into our NPD process. I’m happy to say the preliminary feedback from users has been fantastic: we’ve designed a tool that matches current behavior in a way that none of our competitors have done. The level will launch this fall.

What recommendations would you give researchers who are struggling to successfully incorporate prototyping into the research process? 

In the context of front-end research, prototyping is not about getting feedback on a final idea, but providing some sort of stimulus around an aspect of the idea that forces users to react to it. It is how they react that tells you the most about the question you’re trying to answer. To that point, it’s critical to understand what that question is. And even more critical to drive clarity with your team – often there are multiple questions and the team needs to align on which one needs to be answered first. Once you know the question, the prototypes can then be designed in a way that pokes at that question without necessarily asking about it directly.  

The biggest recommendation for incorporating prototypes in the research process is to pick the appropriate resolution. At Milwaukee Tool we use the framework of “mock-ups to learn, prototypes to confirm.” Typically the earlier you are in the process, when the solution is still a twinkle in someone’s eye, you want lower-resolution mock-ups – the more a stimulus looks unfinished, the more users will be willing to tell you how it should be different. Stimuli can be as simple as de-branded competitive product to focus on performance, a foam-core mock-up of a specific user interaction … or as complex as a carefully designed “potato-head prototype” that lets users build the solution they really want.

Beyond marketing research, what are some of your favorite ways to keep up on consumer trends? 

Conferences. Technology is slowly making its way into the construction industry – and there are lots of conferences that showcase what’s coming. It’s incredibly valuable to attend these shows to see how other companies are approaching the problems we all see on the job site – not just traditional tool companies but companies in parallel spaces as well. One of the challenges in our industry is staying on top of all of the trends in different categories – new products in pipe fitting, for instance, are addressing completely different needs than those in job site lighting. Some of the most forward-thinking work comes out of the mining industry and trickles its way down. By keeping track of what’s coming and making connections across product categories, we can often identify new approaches we hadn’t thought of before.

What new methodologies would you like to explore in the next year and why? 

Given the constraints of our target users, it’s hard to bring our research respondents to us – we get the most value out of visiting job sites and observing/interviewing users in their context of use. Our team has talked about exploring ways to co-create with our users on a job site, using just-in-time prototyping while in the field. I’d love to try some pilot studies out in the next year to see how this might work.