BurdaForward
Innovation with Futures Thinking
BurdaForward is one of Germany’s leading digital publishers. The subsidiary of Hubert Burda Media owns brands with excellent reach, including FOCUS Online, CHIP, Finanzen100, NetMoms, The Weather Channel, Cardscout, and EFAHRER.com, accessing roughly 39 million people per month, or every second Internet user in Germany. BurdaForward’s digital offerings maintain a consistent focus on the needs of users in order to give their everyday life a lasting improvement with relevant and constructive information and services.
New, digital products can only be successful if they concentrate on the core needs that our users have. This only works with attentive and agile teams, innovative ideas, and the right methods. Most importantly, you have to constantly look critically at your own product. denkwerk was the ideal partner for us during this exciting innovation process.
User-centric product development is part of BurdaForward’s core expertise. To go about realizing a new, digital innovation, we joined forces and went through a complete innovation-design process – from research and market analyses through to the actual prototyping. Using our methodology toolboxes for support, we established intensive, agile collaboration with a BurdaForward project team who were full of ideas.
Consistently user-centric through the jobs-to-be-done framework. Powerful innovation through out-of-the-box thinking, future and foresight, and constant reframing. Added altogether, this is exactly what made the process so successful.
We began with an extensive research phase, which just itself delivered an impressive number of valuable results. We shared brainstorming and workshop sessions, helping us to keep viewing things from new perspectives and take a critical look at solutions that had already been developed. This was also how the innovation process guided us to the design sprint via personas, jobs to be done, design thinking, and reframing. After the design sprint, our idea had taken such shape that we could put an initial low-fidelity prototype into acceptance testing with users. Using the insights from these tests and related user feedback, we kept on optimizing – and in the end we programmed a jointly developed prototype which was rolled out as a pilot project to the Burda testing community.
