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Work
Designing a Top-Selling Hard Drive
Through a long-term collaboration, Western Digital and IDEO have created one of the world’s best-selling hard drives
The Challenge
Create reliable, secure, high-performance hard drives for personal and professional use.
Impact
Winners of numerous design awards, including the 2008 IDEA Bronze Award from IDSA and BusinessWeek, and the 2009 iF Award.
The Outcome
Design of the MyBook and MyPassport hard drives end to end, from hardware and software to merchandising and out-of-box experience.
Western Digital, the leading provider of external digital-storage solutions and a pioneer in the field, and IDEO collaborated on a number of products that produced reliable, secure, high-performance hard drives for personal and professional use and have won numerous design awards.
The projects include:
- MyBook external hard drive: IDEO and Western collaborated to find a new design language for their external hard drive MyBook. In just six months, MyBook became the number-one hard drive in the Americas, and grew US market share by more than 50 percent.
- MyBook II: Looking to regain MyBook’s original number-one position in the hard drive market, IDEO and Western came together again to refresh the original design, finding ways to further differentiate the product and the brand, and winning a 2008 Spark Bronze Award.
- MyPassport: Western and IDEO designed the 320GB, ultra-portable USB-powered hard drive that appeals to the mobile user, which won both the 2008 IDEA Bronze Award from IDSA and BusinessWeek, and the 2009 iF Award.
- MyBook and MyPassport 3.0: Again, IDEO and Western collaborated on bringing the popular MyBook external hard drive to the next level in the hardware, the software, and the packaging. IDEO also created in-store merchandising, the graphics and information featured on product packaging (and the “out-of-box experience”).
