Designed for the Rest of Us

Reena Jana of BusinessWeek wrote an interesting article How tech for the disabled is going mainstream. She discusses how designing products to work for disabled people can lead to products for the masses. A great example is the Apple iPod shuffle, with it’s capability for voice navigation that works for blind users or people who want an eyes-free interface. She quotes an interesting observation from Peter Mahoney of speech recognition company Nuance – “While the disabled aren’t a significant percentage of our users today, they are our biggest power users – they help us push the envelope”.

My consulting company Zanzara had some great news from one our New Zealand clients. Formway designs and manufactures innovative office furniture for the global market. Their new ‘Generation’ chair won the coveted gold medal at Neocon,  the largest and most important furniture industry trade show in the USA. Zanzara has worked with Formway on a number of projects, on this one Zanzara conducted extensive observational studies of how people sit and move in chairs. This work contributed to the design of the chair to allow for flexible movement while seated. Congratulations to Formway for this win. The latest ProDesign Magazine carries a review of the chair. Nice design research work by Amanda and the Zanzara team. Get in touch to talk about how we can help you with your design projects, contact: richard.mander@zanzara.com

The Formway Generation chair supports active seating postures and winds Neocon Gold.

A nice interview of Jeff Bezos by Stephen Levy at Wired’s Disruptive by Design conference in New York. Levy takes Bezos through an inspiring discussion of Kindle and gives some insight into Amazon’s business thinking. Some great nuggets from Bezos on the value of a ‘long view’ attitude, why we should not fear failure, and why its hard for an internal team at a large company to be disruptive.

Wired’s conference included a great line up of speakers, many of the videos are available online.

Companies all over the world are looking for ways to be disruptive, especially in these times of economic uncertainty (read ‘opportunity’). The disruptive term was coined in 1997 by Clayton Christenson in his seminal book ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’, if you haven’t read it you’re in luck – go straight to his second book from 2003 ‘The Innovator’s Solution’ and read it instead because it explains how to get disruptive. There is a real nugget of gold on page 75 where Clayton introduces what I have always found to be a sure fired path to innovation – looking at the customer and the job they’re going to do with your product.

Here’s the key – get out and understand what people are actually doing with your product. Look at the problems they have and probe behind these to figure out what really matters to them. They’ll tell you lots of things, and they’ll tell you what they want (free, lots of features, delivered yesterday). However, this is not what’s really useful, as it is your job to figure out what they really need. If you do a good job on this, you’ll identify their ‘unmet needs’.

There are other paths to disruption, but this one is a low risk approach. Identifying the unmet need is the challenge and I recommend Anthony Ulwick’s outcome-driven approach. Another major advantage is this is a great method to get an interdisciplinary team started on working together by focusing on a clear understanding of the customer.

I’ve used this approach on a lot of projects, I learned it at Apple, then applied it at Palm, Sun, Microsoft, SPIE, Navman, HumanWare, and a host of lesser known companies.

Of course, this is just one approach to innovation, equally important is making sure you foster innovation in technology, but that’s a future post.

Alessi is one of the leading design companies – yet their designers are all external to the company. Marla Capozzi and Josselyn Simpson from McKinsey Quarterly interviewed Alberto Alessi and compiled this intriguing presentation on Alessi’s framework for evaluating a new product design. (Click on the link ‘Launch Interactive’ under the picture of Alberto Alessi) It is a great example of how to capture the essence of your product design strategy and use it as a tool in decision making.

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 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.