Canon Design
Canon provides high-quality design and new value through corporate activities that include the customer every step of the way.
Canon ensures the constantly evolving technology and functions featured in its products are easy to understand and easy to use.
July 11, 2019Activity introductions
User-Focused Design
Canon’s business is expanding from consumer products including cameras and printers to such highly specialized fields as medical devices and industrial equipment. The role of design is also expanding from simply designing the product itself to ensuring that products are compatible with other devices and web services. Even with such major changes taking place both in the scope of our business and the roles therein, Canon maintains the same design philosophy we have held since our inception—to pursue design for the people who actually use our products.
The technologies and capabilities built into products are constantly evolving, but they must also be easy to understand and easy to use.
The user experience—when a customer engages with a company’s products or services—links directly to the company’s brand image. Making technology and its capabilities easy to understand and easy to use is an important role of design.
A Customer-Oriented Design Approach
Understanding the customer better is crucial for designing products for the people who will use them.
Before starting the design process, Canon conducts interviews with the people who the products and services are actually aimed at; investigating usage environments, monitoring user behavior and uncovering issues.
Designers and engineers work together to resolve issues. They ask questions from many different perspectives and gather ideas. Then they draw sketches and create product prototypes to turn ideas into visible, tangible things and see if their ideas will resolve the customer’s issues. By repeating this series of steps, they get closer and closer to producing the ideal user experience for the customer.
Canon will continue to enhance brand value through the pursuit of design that combines aesthetic beauty with ease of use.
Study-Abroad Program for Engineers
As part of the company’s R&D globalization efforts, Canon has offered a study-abroad program for its engineers every year since 1984.
The Canon Design Center also sends company designers overseas on this program, who leverage their international experience a great deal during the design development process.
