5 Pieces Of Low-Hanging Fruit To Boost Your Mobility Product's Desirability

Design is powerful. If used strategically, design has the power to significantly drive demand and even enlarge your product's market, by making your product more desirable to your future customers.

What's the catch? While the ROI more than outweighs the costs, design requires an upfront investment of time and money. But what if I told you there are a handful of desirability boosters that leverage the work you've already done? This low-hanging fruit offers big results without a big investment.

Let's look at 5 low investment design mods you can do to boost the desirability of your product:

1. Colors & Materials

Design updates that require new tooling come with a hefty price tag, but refreshing the color of your product allows you to leverage your existing tooling, while still making a dramatic visual refresh. (Provided you pick a desirable color of course!)

Satyendra Singh's Impact of color on marketing reveals that people make a subconscious judgment about a product within 90 seconds of initial viewing and that between 62% and 90% of that assessment is based on color alone.

Similarly, if your product incorporates a medley of materials, you can update them to better attract and delight your target user.

2. Graphics

You can use graphics as a way to grab attention, stand out from other products, add interest to, or even visually alter the forms of your product.

Graphics might be the quickest and cheapest desirability boost by far, but be careful. Graphics need to add functional or visual value or else they'll actually detract from your product's desirability.

As an example, you could use your graphics to clue the user into how to best interact with your product. Or, use graphics to flatter your product's forms.

Kevin Messina, a professional pinstriper, explains the powerful effects that graphics can have- "Pinstripes can actually change the size of a vehicle visually.  Of course, it's an optical effect, but placing pinstripes high or low have a tendency to make some body styles look longer or shorter."

3. Stance

Wheels and tires go a long way to boost the desirability of your product because you can use them to dramatically modify your product's stance. As we've discussed in detail in an earlier article, stance alters the proportions and character of your product.

The overall size, wall thickness, width and knobbiness of your tires affect how high or low your product rides, dictates the look of your product, and can improve your product's capabilities.

One last factor contributing to your product's stance is wheel spacing. Widening or narrowing the wheel's position relative to the body widens or narrows your product's stance.

Choose a wheel and tire combo that gives your product a desirable stance and you've just made your product considerably more attractive to your customer.

4. Relief Add-Ons

Every product has missed opportunities to give its users a perfect experience. Some of these opportunities are easy to jump on.

Spend time with your customers as you observe their entire journey of interacting with your product. What interruptions or issues do you see arising repeatedly?

Some of these issues could be resolved by simple modifications or add-ons. By providing relief for these pain points, thoughtful add-ons deliver a more seamless and delightful customer experience.

Perhaps while observing parents pushing their children through the park, you notice that a majority of them are clenching their cup of coffee in one hand, while controlling the stroller with the other. You could remedy this by attaching a cup holder to your stroller's handlebar.

Now, each time the parent takes her kid for a stroll, she is reminded that your product was thoughtfully designed specifically for her, improving desirability.

5. Personalization

A study by Deloitte reveals that "1 in 4 consumers are willing to pay more to receive a personalized product or service."

Consumers find value in products that they can tailor to align with their personal preferences. This allows them to be slightly different than everyone else or to allow them to adapt the product to their specific needs.

Do you have a stock of color, part, or material options that you can allow your customer to mix & match?

The ultimate win would be to offer your customers the option to personalize their product with items already in your lineup, not adding significant costs on your end.

Coca-Cola creatively leveraged personalization for its highly successful campaign called "Share A Coke" which featured common first names on their Coca-Cola bottles. By simply printing 150 different names on their beverage labels, a standard bottle of Coke transformed into something that consumers perceived as a personalized product.

Colors & materials, graphics, stance, add-ons, and personalization are the low hanging fruit that you can use to boost the desirability of your product without a significant time and cost investment. With a deep understanding of your customer's desires, modify these 5 elements to increase your product's attractiveness.

How to determine what your customers desire? Now that's a story for another time.