Brand New Leftovers
I had dinner the other night with a friend who is in charge of prepared foods for a local supermarket. He’s a professional chef and worked for years in restaurants, and I asked him if doing prepared foods was much different. He made an interesting comment that got me thinking about products and how we present them vs. how people use them.
My friend said that now, instead of making meals, he’s making fresh leftovers. The display case in the market is a big fridge, which customers browse, looking for something that looks good. Then they take it home and heat it up. My friend is not making food that looks and tastes good here and now; he’s making food that looks good now but tastes good later, someplace else.
We have a similar challenge in designing and marketing products. Here, it’s the difference between the on-the-shelf and actual use. Look at what Elke den Ouden found in 2006: half of the products returned to the store are in working order, but the consumer couldn’t figure out how to use them. The shelf presentation convinced the consumer to buy, but the product couldn’t deliver once brought home. My clients often think about the on-the-shelf experience as one of attraction - make the product look fancy, different, or in the words of one recent client, “bling it up.” But that has no bearing on how the product will actually fit into a consumer’s life, functionally nor aesthetically. A gold-trimmed stove would stick out on the showroom floor, but I don’t have a gold-trimmed kitchen. Is sticking out really the right metric for predicting success?
So how do we do a better job of describing the use experience of a product that can’t be used in the showroom? A hungry shopper can’t taste the prepared meal before purchase, so the product must communicate what it tastes like. Similarly, any gizmo on a shelf must communicate not only an aesthetic but a use experience.
This need works against designers. For example, I spoke to a client that manufactures “white goods” - washers, refrigerators, etc. They had considered putting out a highly-featured washing machine, with a touch-screen that allowed the consumer to apply a variety of settings to a load of clothes. The washer outperformed others on the market - but it couldn’t be sold. The salespeople who would be charged with selling the product complained that, because it had no buttons, the washer seemed to have fewer functions rather than more. A large number of buttons did a better job communicating functionality when the product wasn’t plugged in.
As technology allows more products to develop “inner lives” - behaviors and user experience that can’t be experienced without the product operating - it is becoming increasingly important to develop a language designers can use to communicate that experience. Industrial designers can make products look “sleek” as a stand-in for a “smooth” operating experience, but that doesn’t describe what the product really does.
It will be interesting to watch this language evolve. Just as the chef at the supermarket styles the food to look attractive and edible - to look like it’s being served, when in fact it’s being packaged - design and marketing teams must develop their own cues to the consumer that communicate what it’s like to use a high-tech product when it’s not plugged in.
Question for you: What does your product communicate when it’s off?
