Product Behavior

Carol, my mother-in-law, is the poster child for work-arounds. Every visit, I find some interesting behavior she’s developed or product she’s modified that reveals a clear “duh” flaw of product design. Spotting work-arounds is easy research for designers–when I’m observing consumers (or store personnel, or customer service folks), I want to see how consumers have [...]

Designers need to face facts: if marketing folks aren’t thinking about the big picture, design-wise, and we know they’re not thinking it, and we fail to deliver something that makes sense to the way they are thinking, the design is a failure. It’s our fault.
True, many of the marketing folks I meet are not thinking [...]

I collect remote controls. I take pictures of them when I visit clients, and I have a large assortment of old/dead remotes from colleagues. My favorite is this one:

It’s from a Pioneer laserdisc player from (I’m guessing) 1985 or so. It’s nothing to write home about design-wise, but it has on feature that I [...]

I went to an interesting conference a couple of weeks ago–the Academy of Marketing Sciences meeting. I haven’t spent time with marketing academics before, and what I frankly thought would be a dry day being lectured at by people who didn’t really know what the “real world” is like was instead an engaging and challenging [...]