Seagate

Moving from utility to connectivity

THE CHALLENGE

Seagate, an established leader in hard-drive technologies, hoped to expand their offering into the mobile space. The challenge was to envision and design products that would create new demand for an extensive hard-drive capability and appeal to partners, carriers, developers and consumers.

THE SOLUTION

During an initial discovery phase, user and trend research was conducted to identify needs and behaviors and reﬁne the value proposition for a portable, networked hard drive. Multiple concepts were developed, portraying a future vision for increased connectivity and sharing, that would signiﬁcantly drive demand for hard drive capacity. Seagate subsequently launched a series of pocket drives that incorporated a number of the envisioned features and functionality.

concept sketches for personal connectivity

An insatiable demand for storage

With the explosion of digital, content consumption and creation have grown exponentially. With the introduction of smartphones, consuming and sharing media on-the-go has become ubiquitous, which of course means that the need for increased storage has increased significantly. Transferring downloaded content from your home network to all kinds of digital devices like smartphones, cars, and computers has also driven the demand for more storage, while portability requires that the form factor remain relatively small.

The website includes an innovative breakdown of the essentials needed to understand and compare plans. Visualized as a journey, information is presented as destinations to support informed decision-making.

user research findings: participant summaries

Making content easily accessible

User research highlighted that staying connected with family and friends is extremely important (email, blogging, texting) and media-sharing is a significant component of this. The “S-factor”, defined as increased productivity and sharing, inspired four product concepts, that were visualized into storyboards:

Personal Broadcasting & Sharing;
Proximity Sharing & Marketing;
Physical Bookmarking;
Mobile DVR

Supporting an ever-growing media library

These concepts all assume seamless connectivity between the portable drive and a “thin client” such as a phone or other screen-enabled device, that is optimized for media consumption. The drive can hold an extensive media library, that would quickly engulf all the available data storage on the phone. It is essentially a companion device that was a precursor to the cloud. Now that the cloud is firmly established, the need for portable data storage is considerably less, but at the time, these concepts were a radical vision for the future.

Features and dependencies (hardware and software) were also identified to help Seagate more fully evaluate the concepts and decide which development path to move forward with.