Applying Design Roadmapping in New Product Development Education: Insights From Student Design Teams

Abstract

A design roadmap is a canvas that facilitates embedding user experience design goals into the earliest stages of the design process by envisioning how a concept can evolve over time to meet changing user needs. This paper explores the development of design roadmap canvases by product design teams in an educational setting. It does so by (1) examining the design roadmapping workshop deliverables from new product development student teams at the University of California, Berkeley between 2014–2017 and (2) analyzing 107 survey responses from students in those workshops about their design roadmapping experiences. The paper describes the benefits to students using design roadmapping and insights into how best to engage students in design roadmapping exercises. Finally, based on the challenges students had with the process employed in the experiment, recommendations are provided to help educators and practitioners make productive use of design roadmaps.

To Frame or Reframe: Where Might Design Thinking Research Go Next?

“…65 The "design roadmapping" process 66 can operate at the strategy level in the settings described by Liedtka* and Knight et al*, or might readily be used at the product (management) level to capture the experiences to be created by a specific solution family. 67 If customer experience design is happening at multiple places in the organization, how might the various designs best be integrated?…”