Product Behavior

I’ve spent the last few days working on a presentation I’ll be giving at a conference in a few days.
I’ll be speaking about “Resonance,” a design process we use for the development of everything from blenders to businesses. I’m glad to be able to present it, in part because it’s required me to boil the process down to its essence and make a real story out of it.

The gist is this: wait.

What comes first - your product vision, or your product experience? And once you have one, how does the other follow?
A colleague and I got wrapped up the other day in thinking about vision vs. experience. Many of our product development projects start with a focus on technology, and part of our work is to help the client through the process of developing a story that will make sense to consumers. Many of our more strategic projects start with a vision; our job is to develop the right experience to express the vision to the consumer. Projects that start with one or the other are straightforward in that we know what’s driving the process.

The more difficult projects are for clients that have some of each: part of a brand vision defined, and a piece of technology that may or may not deliver an experience in line with that vision.

A fair amount of the work I do involves the design of “user interface.” I don’t know who coined that term, but it’s interesting. I’m sure it was a software engineer, who divided his or her work into “writing the code that actually does stuff” and “writing the code that lets the user interface with the code that actually does stuff.” It’s a term with product-orientation–if we were consumer oriented, we’d call it the “product interface.”

No, this phone is not really red, and yes, the quotes are superfluous. But, in this case, it’s all fine. It’s not a red phone but it is a “RED PHONE.”