Tennant's Innovative Product Design for Industrial Cleaning: The Power of VR & AR

Connect with the Customer

• Prepare for Voice of Customer (VOC) research
  • Document what we think we know and what we think we don’t know. This provides us with areas to validate with the customer as well as areas to gain insight
  • Develop a discussion guide and plan for research

• Conduct VOC
  • Partnering with our sales team, our product manager will establish customer visits in target verticals or market segments and in different geographies. This provides focus to the research as well as the ability to capture similarities and differences between national or global regions.
  • The customer interviews are designed to guide a conversation but not lead the respondent to specific product areas or presumed outcomes. Rather, we listen to our customers explain and demonstrate what they like, don’t like, or don’t understand about our equipment.
• Analysis and Synthesis
  • Once the field research is done, we analyze the research findings to understand what commonalities and differences emerge. Understanding what’s working, not working, or is misunderstood is the objective.
  • Finally, a report document is created to capture the key findings and establish the primary innovation opportunities for the project.

The Tennant Industrial Design team consults with customers to understand their cleaning challenges.

2D sketches help to highlight feedback from VOC research and generate ideas quickly.

Ideation by Leveraging Virtual/Augmented Reality

• 2D Sketching
  • In this phase, the industrial designer applies creative problem solving to the customer needs highlighted in the research. This is done by developing a series of preliminary 2D sketches made with a digital stylus on a specialized pen display. Many different ideas are created—sometimes more than 100—to stretch our thinking and explore the solution space.

• 3D Sketching
  • Relatively new tools and technologies are changing the way we work. From our preliminary 2D sketches, the design team quickly moves into a 3D sketch environment leveraging specialized software and virtual reality/augmented reality (AR/VR) headsets.
  • Sketching in VR provides a totally immersive experience for the designer and collaborators. Partnering with engineering, key components can be imported into the 3D environment and utilized for concept realism and accuracy. Unlike 2D drawing, all product views and areas of user interaction are addressed simultaneously. The software allows for quick full-size evaluation of key user interfaces and ergonomics. For example, understanding if a handle is at a comfortable height or operator controls are positioned for good visibility.
  • Advancements in headset technology allows the design team to leverage AR technology to evaluate designs as a team, with key internal partners like product management and engineering, and our customers.

3D sketching in a VR environment provides an immersive experience for the designer and collaborators.

Implementing VR and 3D Modeling in Product Design

Because the new technology allows the designer to provide their engineering colleagues with 3D concept direction, there is much less translation, changes, and time required to model the production surfaces. This better geometry translation is also proving valuable as we work with teams who speak different languages across the globe by reducing back-and-forth changes and communication.