How Good Is Good Enough?
I swing back and forth wildly between perfectionist and that’s-good-enough-ist. Perfectionism is easy to explain, and many designers and engineers spend time there. But what does it mean to feel like good enough is good enough? When do you cross from “not good enough” to “good enough”? Often, companies find themselves in a morass of market requirements, regulatory requirements, goals, nice-to-haves, and wouldn’t-it-be-cools, without good tools for sorting them out.
Clearly, the “requirements” are required; those are easy. But even interpreting the requirements is difficult. For example, if your product emits certain classes of laser light, regulatory requirements say you must either make a sound while the light is on, or have a warning light someplace. Those are pretty fuzzy. What kind of sound? A warning klaxon, or a soothing new-age melody? A flashing, spinning red light, or a little green LED? Requirements – especially regulatory requirements–are scary because some group, somewhere, is going to decide whether the device passes or not. I hope my interpretation matches theirs.
But it’s the goals that are harder to rationalize. As a designer, I know how I want the product to feel, but I’m not always sure how that stacks up against cost or time-to-market. If we’re making a medical product for use in underdeveloped countries, by a user with only a basic education, must using it be a one-button-push operation? After all, having a fourth-grade education is not the same thing as being a fourth-grader. If the medical worker rode a motorcycle to get to the patient, he or she can certainly be trained to use a product with more than one button.
And what if the user isn’t the buyer? The end user of a product almost never deals directly with the manufacturer – there’s always a purchasing department at the hospital, or in the government, or at the big-box retailed who’s relying on his or her judgment to decide whether the product is or isn’t “good enough” for its application. And even within the manufacturer, the engineering team probably has a different filter than the marketing team, the design team, the CEO…
What tools exist to evaluate how good is Good Enough? There are lots of tools. At one end is the Pugh chart and its engineering-flavored pro/con siblings. At the other end is the focus group – get the answer right from the horse’s mouth. In between are price-sensitivity tests, resonance tests, concept tests of various flavors. And ultimately, there’s gut feel. None of these tools paints a complete picture.
In the end, I suppose the best tool I’ve found is simulation, of both the product and the use case. If the device is meant to be used up to 50 times in a day, build a fake version of the product and use it 50 times. See if it’s good enough. Compare it to the current solution, alternate products, and the product with more-or fewer-features. There’s no substitute for experience, and when it comes to Good Enough, there’s no substitute for Try It And See.
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It’s much more difficult for me to get to that decision as the designer than it used to be as the marketer. The emotional component of the product being an expression of myself results in a whole lot more “not good enough yet.” I recently gave the seal of approval to a product, though, when testers could no longer tell the difference between two versions of the product, or said the differences didn’t matter to them.
Good to have you back, by the way!
Hi EZ,
I know what you mean. But why do you think marketers are less emotionally involved? How can designers “hook” marketing types in so they feel as emotionally involved? Or is it good that someone in the chain has a more objective sense of “good enough”? Maybe no product would ever ship if everyone was as emotionally involved as the designer…
A
I believe the designer’s reasons for feeling hesitant, being as involved with the birth and upbringing of the product as they are, differ from the marketers, who are probably more concerned with sales than anything else. The designer is more like a parent watching their child go off to school for the first time, worried that they’re not ready, that they might not stand up for themselves, whereas the marketer is perhaps more like an employer, wondering only if the kid is ready to make money for him. If the marketer has more input into the design, or even into how the kid dresses to come to school (the packaging), they might become more emotionally involved. But as you say, is that really a good thing? Personally I think it is, since I’ve been involved with some products that were simply not ready to be made, but were pushed forward because of internal pressure, and ended up with problems which hurt the overall brand. Perhaps it comes down to asking “Is it good enough that people will both buy it and like it?” The answer may be in the question.
Right. Everyone involved has their own definition of “done” and the one that matters is the consumer’s. Except that consumers aren’t necessarily the best judges (see Elke Den Ouden’s research showing that half of all product returns are due to complexity or misunderstanding – they either bought the wrong thing or couldn’t figure it out).
But it’s that definition of “done” that drives the issue. Is it a lack of requirements? A lack of differentiation between requirements and goals?
Perhaps it just reflects the emotional and physical disconnect between designers and marketers with their customers, a lack of empathy that I think would be helped by not only trying the prototype 50 times, but watching their customers use it 50 times. A few times is not enough- too easy to rationalize away behavior when it is inconsistant with the beliefs of the designer or marketer, who by this point probably have blinders on as to how the product should and can be used. I think it is beneficial for us to be sitting in the same room with our customers, not watching them on video, so we can really feel their frustration and not easily wiggle out of our discomfort.
Agreed – but (as usual), it’s complicated. It’s easy to get 50 people to play with a product for a few minutes each in front of a designer or marketer. And it’s easy to get a few people to use a product for a longer time and bring the company along for the ride. But it’s hard to get designers or marketers in the field with consumers at the depth that may be required to know if a product delivers both a good “learn to use it” experience and a good “live with it” experience. Maybe there’s a need for something called “ethnographic evaluation.”
I propose that the designers, marketers, and consumers be both observers and observed for such evaluation. Mix in and try the product together. You can tell them you’re the designer (I find that people are more than willing to share their thoughts with me as a designer, more so than with me as the marketer) or pretend you’re just another consumer. Which, in a way, we should be. When I do ethnography while people cook, I try to be more of the friend over for dinner, chatting while they cook, stirring and tasting the sauce to see if it needs more garlic, trying their favorite products that they proudly take out of their cupboards. Not as scientific, perhaps, but not as sterile either. And a lot more fun for everybody involved. Didn’t Continuum do that for the Coleman Grill ethnography? Didn’t the researchers go to people’s homes and grill with them?
Yes, that’s part of what we do, but it’s for research & idea development, not usually post-design evaluation. By the time a product is designed “enough” to be used in the real world, it’s on final approach to delivery. The normal feedback path then is: does it sell? Does it review well? For most companies in my experience, ethnographic research (or name-your-favorite research technique) into how the product actually gets used doesn’t happen until it’s time to develop input into the next version of the product. Maybe that happens years later, which a completely different management team involved. It would be more interesting to have the design & marketing teams involved with “revision A” of a product to research into what works and what doesn’t while it’s still fresh.
The industrial designer in me says bravo, while the marketer in me prods to get the thing out already. A good compromise may be that each product only gets one post-design, pre-launch ethnographic evaluation, otherwise there might be the temptation to do it again after the results from the first evaluation have been implemented into the product (just to make sure), ad infinitum. Perhaps limit the time or number of changes that can be made to each product before it must get launched. Indeed, maybe the fact that Ethnographic Evaluations are not done actually help get products into the marketplace, for better or worse, but at least they’re out there making money for the company. Or alienating customers.