Team obvi is excited to announce obvi text is now live 🎉 ! obvi is a diary study tool for bite-sized, human-centered research. If you do innovation, insights, or any design research, this is something you will want to check out.
obvi is the first digital product made by obvi design co., an innovation consultancy in California started by former IDEO design directors Misa Misono and Josh MacAdam. Obvi design works with the biggest brands in the world to uncover insights, develop innovation strategy, and create brands, experiences, and products. Right now, we’re working on a series of breakthrough projects to understand the outsized impact Gen-Z is just starting to make on the world.
We believe the best designed products and services have a point-of-view, which is earned through obsessive research, meticulous design, and relentless editing. It is that belief which has driven the evolution of obvi text.
Human-centered research is a part of every project we do. We do in-home interviews, focus groups, and public polling all the time. But we can’t be everywhere at all times, and our projects require getting to know people in many locations and circumstances. Existing digital tools all seem to be big and complex, rigid, and super expensive. We didn’t enjoy training people how to use special apps and complex surveys, and we weren’t interested in professional research participants.
We wanted a way to connect with people during their daily lives in a comfortable, natural way. So we asked them to text us. It was awesome. Even for participants within our local area, we had a way to see what dinner with the family looks like on a random Tuesday. Or hear how the wildfires were affecting them. The feedback was quick, rich, and authentic--we wanted to do more.
We developed a tool to handle texting the groups and compiling their responses. Of course, that made us want a way to highlight quotes and get them on the wall in our project space. The tool kept evolving until we could run whole studies in it and It became a part of every project.
We think everybody should be doing this sort of research, and we know how hard it is without tools. We decided to build it out into a product, and set down some principles and goals right away:
- Privacy for participants
- No setup, just put in phone numbers and go
- Flexible around participant behavior and responses
- Printable - everything
- Exportable - everything
- Pricing expensable, but also work in orgs
During development we used it on all of our projects, and invited our colleagues at other firms to use it provide feedback. We experimented with different types of questions, responses, and projects, and kept refining and simplifying until it was finally ready for public launch.
The product roadmap for obvi text is super ambitious. Our beta users keep discovering and proposing new use cases that we had not considered, and active product development is underway. Other digital products are also in the works! We are designers, researchers, and product makers who want many more beautifully designed tools. If you are a product manager for a digital product or a researcher in a large organization, stay tuned!
We invite you to take obvi text for a spin. We’d be happy to schedule a demo for you and discuss how you can use it for your next project. Feel free to create an account and click through the demo project.
Thanks for reading and we hope you ❤️obvi text!
