Carrying The Clubs
I’ve written previously about using the idea of “hiring a product” as a way to think more broadly about the relationship between consumer and product. Here’s an example.
For example, a few years ago I developed the use experience for a new form of insulin pump. This is a device for people with Type 1 diabetes. It helps regulate blood sugar by delivering insulin at both a preprogrammed rate and in an on-demand fashion. The device was designed to help the patient learn about diabetes and manage it as a part of life, rather than simply act as an automatic syringe.
The team considered the relationship between patient and device, and quickly began considering ways to personify the device. Should the device be like a doctor, asking questions about the patient’s condition and advising what to do next? Should it be like a policeman, strictly enforcing rules? Should it be like a best friend, giving support but letting the patient make her own decisions?
One bit of trouble many companies run into is to assume their product’s job is to save the world, and be everything to everyone. Their product is Superman. Unfortunately, such companies are blind to the tradeoffs required to make a product manufacturable and marketable. It’s fine to have a vision for the future, when the product has matured enough to serve a wide variety of applications and consumers. But that’s often an unrealistic view that results in products that try, but fail, to be great at many things, instead of succeeding to be great at a few well-understood things.
But I digress. In the case of the pump, one of the key considerations was that the device shouldn’t be seen as prescribing insulin doses. If I tell it I ate a cheeseburger, it could use some simple, pre-programmed knowledge of my physiology and deliver the exact amount of insulin needed to maintain stable blood-sugar (within constraints; it’s a little more complicated in reality). But that feature makes physicians nervous–they want the patient involved in the decision-making.
In the end, we settled on “caddy” as the role the product should fill. Sounds weird, but bear with me. The goal is to identify the sorts of traits that characterize the job, and describe the user’s relationship with the product in those terms. A caddy holds your tools, and can make recommendations, but it’s a support role - you decide which club to use. In our case, the insulin pump recommends the amount of insulin to take, but the patient must confirm the amount and can edit if he or she feels the right amount is different. Once we identified this relationship, many decisions about the features and workflow of the device were simplified: how would a caddy handle the situation?
So, as usual: think about the job your product is performing, and the character of the relationship you intend between product and consumer.
Question for you: Does your product’s job have an analog in person-to-person relationships?
[Caddy photo by studio113]
