I Feel Pretty
Minneapolis-based Worrell turns its own design philosophy on itself designs—and generates more business in the process.
BY SARA AASE
’t everything” probably wasn’t in sales. Or design. Worrell, a Minneapolis-based product design firm with $5 million in revenues, knows that the mantra “form follows function” makes or breaks its clients’ products in the marketplace. “People buy a product when they see it and go, ‘Wow,’” says company founder and CEO Bob Worrell. His firm has created several recent such offerings. Its redesign of the basic home thermostat (VisionPro) as a simple touchscreen device, for example, significantly drove up Honeywell’s 2005 sales of that item.
But business really ramped up after Worrell turned its own design philosophy on itself. In recent years, the company has been growing at a 22 percent clip. Up until recently, its 40 employees were crammed into a 7,300-square-foot space in Eden Prairie. This year they’ll celebrate their 30th anniversary at a new, 30,000-square-foot design campus next to the Grain Belt Brewery in Northeast Minneapolis. “The space has energized us as well as inspired our customers,” Worrell says, adding that the building, a converted warehouse, allows the firm to extend its staff research, development, and design and prototyping capabilities, increasing dollar volume per project and attracting new customers. New clients, for example, have included the Virginia-based Hammerhead sled, a sleek exoskeleton version of the old Flexible Flyer; and the Zeno zit zapper—a $225 Zippolike device that late last year was feted on Oprah and in major magazines.
To get at how customers really would use its clients’ products, Worrell employs ethnographers, psychologists, and even a school teacher to study customer behavior. To redesign a Guidant device that triggers patients’ implanted defibrillators to shock their hearts, for example, Worrell learned that the old devices were stressful to use. Patients had to wave it over their hearts whenever they felt they had symptoms of a trial fibrillation, or abnormal rhythm, and then wait for a shock. The problem was that their symptoms weren’t always accurate. So Worrell redesigned the device, the Latitude, to communicate wirelessly with the defibrillator. Results then show up as green, yellow, orange, and red lights on the dashboard-like device. Green indicates OK; yellow means take your medicine; orange, call your doctor; and red, administer a shock.
Worrell also has customers answer a survey of potential product features, rating each on a 1-5 scale. It runs the responses through a sophisticated algorithm that can help it predict which features should make the cut to a prototype.
For the Latitude, for example, Guidant didn’t think a voice prompt was useful or necessary, but Worrell’s research indicated it was. That feature is now one of its most popular, Worrell says. “We call that customer delight,” he says. “Giving the customer something they didn’t know to ask for.”