Herman Miller: A Case Study in Digital Design and IoT Integration
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Computer Vision Software
- Robots - Collaborative Robots
Applicable Industries
- Buildings
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Experimentation Automation
- Time Sensitive Networking
Services
- Testing & Certification
About The Customer
Herman Miller is a globally recognized furniture design company, founded in 1905 and headquartered in Zeeland, Michigan. The company is known for its iconic designs, such as the Eames, Aeron, and Mirra chairs, Nelson Bubble Lamps, and many more. The company employs around 3,500 people and operates in the retail industry. Herman Miller's brand and product teams are tightly integrated, and they produce big works with small teams. The company's design team emphasizes collaboration and respect for the company's design heritage, which helps ensure a strong brand vision.
The Challenge
Herman Miller, a globally recognized furniture design company, was facing a unique challenge. Despite having a strong design heritage and a brand that is synonymous with iconic furniture designs, the company was struggling to translate this design prowess into the digital realm. The company's brand and product teams were tightly integrated, producing significant works with small teams. However, the company had more designers than developers building digital products, a rarity in enterprise businesses today and a reversal of the usual designer-to-engineer ratio. This imbalance was creating a bottleneck in the development of digital products. The company was also working towards adding more in-house software engineering expertise with the goal of fully integrated product and platform teams. The challenge was to maintain the company's strong design heritage while transitioning into the digital space.
The Solution
Herman Miller adopted a process-oriented approach to tackle this challenge. The process began with initial design and customer research to understand the problem. This was followed by a project brief and a discovery meeting with stakeholders to define the goals, KPIs, and the work to be done. The team then held a project kickoff meeting to establish review dates, expected deliverables, and assignments. In cases where projects were big and there were more unknowns, the team would run a design sprint. The smaller project team would then create content and wireframes, iterating on comps and copy until after each design review. The team also tracked time on all projects to get better at estimating time and resources for new projects, and to make a strong case to management when new hires were needed. The design team and stakeholders would then review InVision prototypes, followed by a build-out with developers, usability testing, and finally, launch and monitor KPI performance.
Operational Impact
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