I’ve been reading some lately about co-creation and participatory design being a great method for innovation. Co-creation is the practice of directly involving customers and end users in the design process — treating them as design partners rather than just consumers of your products and services.
If you have practiced or championed co-creation, what has been your experience with it? What was your biggest obstacle to selling a co-creation design process within your company?
I’d love to hear from anyone that has experience here also. Sounds like it could be really valuable if done well.
We do this at my job. We’ll involve clients as early as the lo-fi prototype stage and get their feedback.
It wasn’t very difficult to get buy-in on this at my business, as we have a limited number of clients (in the hundreds, I believe). It’s not difficult to gain buy-in for participatory design when it’s a high-value client driving feature development, and we want to make sure that we’re making a product that client (and others) will actually use.