Product Behavior

One simple thing I like doing when thinking about companies, products, and services, is the Modal Verb exercise. It’s interesting to do it by myself, and interesting to do with other designers and with clients. It’s easy–just fill in these blanks.

I’ve been talking to a friend who’s thinking of launching a startup. One of things he’s considering is how to adapt the principles of the “triple bottom line.” The ideas is that the company is beholden to stockholders, but also other stakeholders, and that it will pay attention to performance not only economically, but also environmentally, and socially. There are many versions of this floating around on the web. One of the interesting things about this kind of thing is the way it mirrors the way “design thinking” considers more than just problem-solving in product design.

What is “design,” anyway? Is it the ability to draw stuff? Is it the ability to cobble together a mechanism? Those may be part of it, but they miss the real point. Design is how you decide what to draw, and what to cobble together.

Many of the medical-technology companies I work for ask us to develop interfaces that use no text–icons only. It’s one of my least favorite conversation with a client. We sit in front of a very long list of product features; I envision a very simple menu system, organized to let the user easily find what he needs; the client says, “of course, we want to sell this in Europe and Asia, so everything has to be icon-driven. My heart sinks.

A couple of years ago, a really large consumer electronics manufacturer hired my company to do an evaluation of their products relative to their consumers, both in terms of basic “design” (by which they meant aesthetics) and usability. I managed the usability effort, and we examined 40 or so products in 5 categories, including portable electronics and large appliances, over the course of a couple of marathon days in a London hotel function room.

It was a pretty fun, if exhausting, experience, and I learned something along the lines of what Seth Godin suggests. If product manufacturers would just bring in some broad-thinking designers at the last minute, the consumer’s experience would be better. Maybe much better.