Getting Detailed
Last week, Seth Godin suggested that there’s room in this world for a web “podiatrist”–someone to work with corporate clients and just make their web sites better by applying some common, checklist-style sense. Just do the final polish, not the deep architectural work. It’s a great idea, but not just for web sites; every product could stand to be detailed.
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. The major differences between the products of my client and its competitors were minor differences. At a gross level, the products were the same; it was the detailed that made most, if not all, of the difference. 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.
Such a designer would be able to spot problems like, “that drawer grease gets on your hands when you install the fridge, so just warn me,” or “that TV remote has a button that the consumer will never use in practice, so you can get rid of it,” or “you don’t need all those twist-ties.” Those designers will spot problems in the installation guide, the on-product labels, and the packaging container. All the little things that make dealing with modern products more painful than they need to be.
Why don’t manufacturers just do this? Why is the last person a product sees before it enters mass production a manufacturing engineer, who thinks about manufacturing, instead of a designer, who thinks about consumer experience? For one thing, designers have a bad reputation for complaning about stuff. Fact is, after a design leaves the designers hands, it will be changed–a lot. And designers really hate that.
So here’s my plan: don’t let the original designers do the polishing. And don’t let the polishing designers complain about large-scale architectural issues. Wait until the molds are made, and the manual is in the next-to-last revision, and the packaging is designed but not yet manufactured. Wait until all that can change are the things that usually wait until the last minute, and let the designers have their way. Make whatever changes–small changes!–they believe will help the consumer install, learn, and use the product.
Reduce the path between the designer, who’s job is to think about the consumer, and the consumer.
