Dimensional Design
Segmenting people is a tricky game, and a modern approach is long overdue
The market as we know it has become more fragmented and complex than ever before
What we do is what defines us - not our demographics
Human potential is great, and ever growing. This is reflected in diversity in thought, action, and opinion. It’s time to unpack the boxes we put people in, and work across other dimensions than traditional segmentation categories.
Demographics are helpful in finding people – but they are not enough to understand what drives them to act, react, or make decisions when triggered.
Humans are not so simple. We live across multiple dimensions. Dimensions represent the range of reactions that we can be triggered across. While these shift across time and place, we can anticipate how individuals will respond, and group consumers accordingly. By thinking across dimensions, we can design for those on the fringes.
It's easier, and fairer, to assume or anticipate how people could react to triggers, than to cluster different behaviors based on demographics that don't necessarily relate to them.
This Dimensional Design framework will help you avoid reducing your audience to over-simplified demographics.
Dimensions are a way to tell a story that goes beyond just the description of a character, but digs deep into their journey, their challenges, their dreams, their sense of morality and their circumstances.
Download guide & framework
The guide offers a new framework for diving behind the triggers that shape human behavior, facilitating the predictions on how they might engage with your product, service, or business in the future.
This framework is a more comprehensive, human way to look at and understand different consumer groups, allowing you to gain deeper insights, make bigger moves, and design better experiences.
The Dimensional Design framework can help you
- Find the fringe audiences that could represent the next scaling strategy for your business.
- Challenge assumptions and biases of larger group categories
- Understand the increasing fluidity and fragmented audiences
- Consider the impacts of including the ‘out of scope’ populations in your solution design
- Dive behind the triggers that shape human behavior, facilitating the predictions on how they might engage with your product, service, or business in the future
Dimensional Design
Taking your innovations
beyond stereotypes
At Board of Innovation, we’re focused on making what life needs next. And that starts with understanding who we’re making it for — your consumer.
Dimensional design takes your innovations beyond traditional stereotypes, and future-casts your view of the consumer. It helps you consider what they want, feel and need more dynamically. Better dimensional understanding helps you innovate more relevant and meaningful products and services for consumers’ lives.
We are here to guide you as you apply this framework, build empathetic and human centric understanding across the dimensions and apply learnings as you co-create solutions for people. Let’s chat?
Carol Menezes
Sr. Business Designer & Strategist
Aidan Lethem
Business Designer
Joining forces with the world's most ambitious businesses to make what life needs next
We’re a global innovation firm, imagining tomorrow’s products, services & businesses — and creating them today.
Get the tools
Dimension Deck of Cards
To start discussions about Dimensional Design, we’ve compiled a deck of cards that help you appreciate how your existing consumers would react based on triggering some system-level dimensions.
You can use them to find new consumers you haven’t thought of before, as these cards serve as tools to provoke new perspectives on who to target across dimensions.
Dimensional Designer
Get in the headspace of your consumers’ behavior and analyze how well your value proposition overlaps with consumer needs.
