Designed for the Rest of Us

Nice validation from McKinsey of the attractiveness of easy-to-use products. Their report ‘Consumer electronics gets back to basics‘, based on in depth interviews of 2,500 consumers, found consumers are looking for well conceived products, designed to be simpler, at a discount of 30% below the full featured product. This is because consumers do not value, and are frustrated by, products with complex features that they don’t use. A great argument to support
my view that products need to be easy-to-use and meet the needs of users. Three take aways:

1. Consumers are overserved. Less than 1/3 of respondents used advanced features in products. This is the classic case of an opportunity to be disruptive – price lower but with the features users really need.
2. People value lifestyle benefits over technical capabilities. They want to capture memories and share them, not shoot HD video.
3. New web social networking tools make it easy for consumers to share their experiences with products. Guess what they talk about – how the product is easy-to-use and provides value for their money.

Here are two products that in the last couple of years have captured huge shareholder value by providing what a segment of users really need. The Flip video camera and the Acer Netbook. Both are products stripped of advanced features and priced at a discount compared to a regular video camera or notebook computer. They are selling like hot cakes because they provide the features consumers really want and are willing to pay for.

The Flip video camera - let's you capture memories

The small Acer Netbook is big enough to work on while away from your desk. Lightweight, with just enough features to get you on the web where you can do email and use web apps.

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”.

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.

Just read a very interesting book by Michelle Kaufmann.  Prefab Green describes the philosophy of her architectural design firm who specialize in design and manufacture of prefabricated modular homes which are green. Michelle got started on this path when she and her husband were struggling to find a well designed, affordable home in the San Francisco Bay Area and ultimately decided to design and build their own home.

Michelle follows five eco principles which guide her design approach:

• Smart Design: Making the most use of space – collaborating with landscape and designing for use.
• Eco Materials: High quality, eco-friendly products and practices in construction. Renewable and recyclable materials, reduced waste in construction, long-lasting and low-maintenance materials.
• Energy Efficiency: High efficiency insulation, solar panels, LED lighting, smart heating.
• Water Conservation: Reducing water intake, rain-water catchment, gray water systems, green roof, bioswales, permeable materials for driveways and walkways.
• Healthy Environment: Non-off-gassing materials, air filtration, foam insulation, hard floors.

Some beautiful ’smart’ design here, and great integration of technology. I would love to live in one of these homes.

It would be very interesting to see what it would take to have the Glidehouse design ‘accessible’, I would bet not much.

Prefab Green by Michelle Kaufmann

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.