Opine Consulting » Product design

How to have disruptive ideas

Simon Kirby — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:53:53 +0000

A folding plug won the Brit Insurance Design Awards in the UK this week.

As gadgets get smaller, Britain has the largest plug in the world. A problem, brought to life in this video:

The traditional British plug was invented in 1946. Why did it take 64 years to invent a better one? More importantly, why didn’t any of the rest of us have that idea?

Listen to what nobody says

I think the reason is that it’s so hard to find unvoiced customer needs. No British customer has ever said to a product designer “I’d like a more portable electric plug.” Not even to the inventor. Instead the designer, Min Kyu-Choi, had an experience; he scratched his new laptop on its plug.

Their are so many ways to trigger the inductive leaps that create innovative new products. But for me, the best one is to have direct experiences. The easy part of that is that we all of us have experiences continuously. When my alarm goes off, that’s a customer experience. When I get on the train, it’s a customer experience. Buying my morning coffee – an experience. They all come bundled up with satisfaction and frustration.

The hard part is noticing the response rather than accepting the “how things are-ness” of it. One of the best ways is to keep a record of what happens – mark up every experience on a timeline and plot your emotional response.

Not taking problems for granted is the first step towards great product design.

Design for experience, not features

Simon Kirby — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:51:25 +0000

The problem with product development

The iPhone is one of the least usable phones for sending text and email but gets the highest consumer satisfaction of any smartphone. Why? It’s product design that’s based around experience not features.

Small usability, big love

An average iPhone user makes almost three times more errors per text message than someone using a hard-key QWERTY phone (see
usercentric.com). But googling the terms “iPhone love” gets about 336 million results and the iPhone has higher customer satisfaction than any other smartphone (see JDPower consumer research, here
).

Experience not features

It’s not just less usable. If anything, the iPhone has less features than many competitors. Mobile email, voicemail and mobile web browsing are hardly new, you can’t forward a text or voicemail and the camera is positively primitive.

But it does have Apple’s trademark obsession about experience. This isn’t just in the fluidity of the interface or the resolved simplicity of the case. If you buy one in an Apple store it will be “served” to you with a flourish like Michelin-starred food.

Product developers spend lots of time benchmarking product features and prioritising them using techniques like conjoint analysis. What we need to do more of is design, customer ethnography and journey mapping to build experiences out of our products.