LG Styler U.S. market case study
The LG Styler is an appliance that will de-wrinkle, steam, and sanitize your clothes. It’s essentially a dry-cleaning machine for your home. Developed by LG, this appliance is popular in South Korea as a wedding gift for newlyweds. While I was a designer at Phloy, we were given this project to assess the unique needs of the NA consumer as compared to a typical asian consumer.
1. ux research
The UX Research for this project spanned two months, and in-home user studies on both the west coast and east coast. We had product manager from LG who flew in from South Korea, along with independent research experts. The core team consisted of the owner of Phloy, two interns, and myself, the product designer.
The home visits consisted of visiting homes where we would install the Styler appliance and go through a series of observations and interviews to determine the effectiveness, along with various pain points of the users. The interns and myself were responsible for taking notes that we can synthesize into key insights later in the research process.
Design synthesis has a few components. It’s very important to explain the note-taking process during the in-home user studies. We color coded all post-its into four different observation categories: What we saw, what we heard, what we thought/felt, and what feature ideas would come into our minds. We took all of our notes and organized the post-its into key insight themes and personas. Sometimes we would have just three key insights if we were all in agreement during study. Sometimes we would have up to six key insights if we had different perspectives on the users’ experiences and pain points.
In addition to in-home user studies, we conducted an ideation workshop by renting a hotel conference room and gathering research participants. Each table would have a few homeowners, and one designer who would be the lead. We went through ideation sessions with the participants and the designers would develop concepts based on the conversations that took place at each table.
Our research also included visits to schools and retail stores that sold appliances. We also conducted a in-depth research visit to a dry cleaning company in New Jersey. All of these research exercises assisted us in understanding how people in the clothing care industry approach the problems that people have with cleaning and maintaining their clothing.
The design research portion consisted of appliance trends of the time.
