Half of the team at Guinn Partners is dedicated to testing and validation, user experience, and product development. This activity usually comes before the sexy shiny public facing stuff, but it can be the part that makes or breaks a product’s chance of success. We’ve just finished a unique project that combines three things we hold dear – user experience, wake-surfing, and drones – and how they can be combined to validate product-market fit. In this video, we break down how we used drone technology to quantify the quality of the waves that are being made by towboats to allow people to experience surfing without having to live near the ocean!
For this project, we worked as an independent third party to test 13 boats from Malibu, Nautique, Axis, Moomba, and Mastercraft to determine an accurate wave quality comparison. Whenever we do testing – whether for boats, drones, vehicles, cameras, sensors, or other products – we look at it from the users’ perspective. What experiences do they actually engage with? What conditions do they use the product under? What are the variables engineering teams might not think of that give products high re-use value or a high net promoter score? We brought this same perspective to how we ran these tests and how we showcased the results after.
Wave quality comparison for wake-surfing boats isn’t as easy as it sounds. This is actually a very challenging scenario that many have tried to quantify for years using tape measures, GoPro’s, and more to try and assess wave quality.
We solved this problem with drones. We flew DJI Inspire 2 rigs alongside the boats capturing content at 6k resolution, giving us the ability to have higher resolution and a new perspective on measurements that couldn’t be otherwise obtained. Then our killer motion graphics team was able to take that footage and overlay visuals to help understand what was happening on the surface of the water to see exactly how they compare.
You can view the content on our microsite, enjoy!