All agreed. I think part of the issue I have stems from working in a large design consultancy – we usually don’t have control over a client’s entire portfolio of products, which is both hampering and freeing. Hampering in that we often must design within a design language that we didn’t develop–and very often merely evolved over time in uncontrolled ways. Freeing in that we can focus our energy on making *this* product as good as it can be using what we know about doing good design, without the tangle of a large company’s politics (that, we leave to our client).

As far as Apple’s process goes, I think their success comes from self-restraint as much as anything else. Less a matter of including what they should, and more of leaving out what they could.

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A tricky question. First, bottling ‘aesthetics’ is always going to be tough, and there are significant differences between different product categories in their need for different types of aesthetic qualities (and of course our different tastes) – so I don’t think you’ll ever get some quant-y style measures that work along the lines of usability evaluations or ergonomics. Some companies like Google do perform hard core quantitative ‘granular bucket testing’ of changes to the user experience – but these are small, live and highly focused on increasing easily measured metrics.

Back in the physical world, easier perhaps than developing tools for evaluating the look of individual products (which can be done through qual focus groups and other person to person systems) is developing the governance systems for evaluating design language across whole portfolio’s of products.

Setting up standard parameters for aesthetic variation depending on the position of a product on a matrix of similar products makes its easier to move the conversation away from the merits of the individual design decisions, and into the realms of the relative quality of decisions against other known decisions. This of course only works where an organisation makes a range of similar products.

Finally, although I agree with the need to involve users in the design process, its got to be said that you can’t beat a talented, passionate designer working as part of a team with a clear vision of a better world made possible by their designs : )

I’ve heard that Apple (kings of portfolio management and cross channel design language consistency) don’t do user testing, they just build products that they really, really want to use…

You’re right about functionality – as long as someone has set reasonable, well-defined usability goals for a product, testing whether the design meets those goals is pretty straightforward. Not everyone understands the process, but that’s what design consultants are for, among other things.

My consternation is over aesthetics, and it applies as much to medical devices as consumer products. And aesthetics aren’t particularly regulated, and certainly aren’t seen as part of the functionality – they’re never part of a product requirements document.

Certainly, if you’re a startup with a novel medical device and your product is the only one that does what it does and people need it, it doesn’t much matter what it looks like. But that’s a very small percentage of products. Most medical products must communicate some sort of message and make some sort of emotional statement. Things like diabetes-care devices are basically commodity consumer products at this point. Laboratory equipment must connect with the buyer at the hospital, communicate their value to the technician, look cool on a tour of hospital trustees. So, for the most part, medical products don’t get a free pass these days. They must work as intended, but that’s not sufficient.

Finding a way to characterize aesthetic goals and include them in with product requirements is part of what I’m after.

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Good designs have a certain “zen” quality to them in that people just know when it’s right-it’s intuited. But that’s not qualitative.

Again, in the medical realm, user feedback should be (but granted, isn’t always) the barometer by which design quality is judged-and this is obtained frequently and often prior to launch. There isn’t a choice. The regulatory framework demands that design aspects be in place prior to launch. It NEEDS to be the right design, a quality design, as close to launch as possible-not just for competitive reasons but for safety and healthcare reasons.