Designed for the Rest of Us

Great post by Douglas MacMillan citing examples of people who are using out of date products that still work fine for them Readers defend out-of-date gadgets.

For myself, my Thinkpad is approaching 5 years old and I am woken every morning by my ten year old Palm PDA which I use now exclusively as an alarm clock – I’ll write another time as to why its such a great alarm clock.

Perhaps we need to slow down a little bit and think before we chuck out old gear, and perhaps as designers we need to think about how to make things last a little bit longer.

Harry West has an interesting viewpoint in his BusinessWeek Innovation post The New Humble World Order. He asks what needs to drive design of products for boomers in the ‘new economic order’.

I recently saw an interesting contrast in the Business Media and Communications section of the International Herald Tribune. Two unrelated articles which highlight two ends of the technology spectrum.

On the one hand a story about Vertu describes a new mobile phone service in Japan, Ultrarich only, please, where some customers are willing to pay $100,000 for a hand made phone handset – it does have diamonds encrusted on the case. On the other hand a story about 03b who are installing satellite networks in remote areas of Kenya, An oasis of connectivity in rural Kenya.

I’m not down on turning a mobile into a piece of jewelry, that’s kind of interesting. However, I find it compelling to hear the story of 0b3 which stands for the ‘other three billion’ people who are not on the internet. Different design challenges for different markets. It would be interesting to put the product requirements specs for these two products next to each other.

We often hear people say that you can’t ask customers to design your product. I agree. However, I’m a big advocate of having a solid understanding of who is going to use a product and what they’re going to try to do with it – this knowledge can really help you in making design decisions and tradeoffs. Ed McQuarrie has worked with many companies over the years to teach teams how to do effective customer visit programs. His approach is fast and effective. I’ve used it on many projects as a way to quickly gather useful information that can help inform the design process. Ed visited New Zealand in 2007 and 2008 and had such a great time that he’s returning in March 2009. Sandra Lukey is organizing his workshops and her SmartNet events are always high value. There are a few spots left so I encourage my New Zealand friends to take advantage of the opportunity to hear it ‘from the master’. Here’s a link to the flier. The workshops are sponsored by the NZ Government’s TechNZ team – guys who know how to take the long view.

An interesting side note on Ed – while at HumanWare I wanted to expose our product managers to some new ideas on design research. I picked a few books that I thought might be good background – Ed’s ‘Customer Visits’ was one of them. My problem was that a few of the people who’d need to read them were blind, I needed to try to get them on tape. I emailed the authors, some never replied, one said he’d ask the publisher. Ed replied within an hour with the latest edition attached as a word file and granted permission to record it or have it printed in braille – somehow that wasn’t a surprising reaction from the man who understands how to meet customer needs.

When I went to work at HumanWare, I was pretty excited to be working with blind people. Three weeks into the job I attended the CSUN conference which is a large event held every year in Los Angeles where many Assistive Technology companies show off their products. I arrived and found myself staying at a typical large American conference hotel – a labyrnth of corridors and rooms. I took the elevator to what I thought was the right floor, the car was packed full with people, baggage, guide dogs, and white canes. On exiting I was confronted with a typically confusing hotel wayfinding sign which didn’t really help me in my quest to find my room. As I muttered under my breath, a fellow elevator passenger with a white cane approached me and asked if I needed help. My initial assumption was that he couldn’t possibly know where my room was – however when I told him the room number he said “take a right and it should be about the third room on the left”. He turned out to be exactly right. This was one of many insightful moments I experienced in working with blind people. A great example of how our assumptions can get in the way.

DisabilityLand is the latest book from Alan Brightman and it is a treasure of insights into the ‘experiences of disability’ – what it is like to live in ‘disability land’. His anecdotes are collected from disabled children, adults, parents, educators, and his own experiences as an advocate and leader. I met Alan when his group at Apple, the ‘Worldwide Disability Solutions Group’, was already well established and thriving. It is interesting to read the story about when he proposed the concept for the group to Apple’s CEO. The answer, in typical Apple style, was:

‘You have to promise me that if this initiative is going to fail it will FAIL HUGE’.

Well Alan and his team did not fail, in fact they succeeded in making an industry more aware of the potential the computer had to change people’s lives by empowering them.

But this book is not about what Alan has done in his career, that is really a small part of it. 

The book is full of great observations about the assumptions we make as to what it means to be disabled. He manages to challenge us and at the same time leave us inspired to do the right thing – to be enablers. I encourage you to read it – this is the sort of book that can have a profound influence on your thinking and also give you hope for how things could be. Alan continues to lead the charge on these issues at Yahoo. Meanwhile, the people at Apple are doing a really good job of stepping up to the continued challenge of making their products work for everyone. Also check out www.disabilityland.org

I got one of the first Macs in New Zealand. While I was using an IBM mainframe to crunch statistics from my research, I was able to desktop publish my master’s thesis on my Mac. The contrast between the experience on the IBM mainframe and the Mac had quite an impact on me. At the time Apple talked about the Mac being the computer ‘for the rest of us’ – it was easy-to-use and you didn’t have to be an engineer to do powerful things with it. 

When I later went to work at Apple I found the ‘for the rest of us’ mantra was part of the Apple core values. One of my managers, who at one time had been the evangelist for Apple’s ground breaking LaserWriter printer, explained the mantra of the LaserWriter team had been to ‘build the laser printer for the rest of us’. Later I got to design the user experience for a ‘projector for the rest of us’ which Apple was developing – this was challenging when most people’s biggest fear was to give a presentation let alone try to make a projector work at the same time! In the QuickTime VR team we said we were developing ‘virtual reality for the rest of us’ – our goal was to give people a VR experience with ‘a one button mouse, no goggles, and a regular computer’. At Apple, we assumed our job was to make technology work for the rest of us. I think that if you look at Apple’s products today, you can see they still hold true to this ideal. So who is ‘the rest of us’?

The ‘rest of us’ means ‘all of us’ – folks who may not understand the technology behind a product, but want to use the product to get something done.

Frequently ground breaking products make use of new technologies, but the ability to make products functional and usable is a key factor in making new products a success for customers. In this blog, my goal is to make people more aware of how we can design products to be used by non-technical people – ‘the rest of us’. But more than that I’ve come to be aware in recent years that with a small amount of effort we can be much more inclusive when we design products. So, when we say ‘the rest of us’, I include in that people who need products to be accessible.