Product Behavior

How do we know we’re designing right? How do we know our design is good? Is “good enough” for a client the same as “good enough”? Who decides if a design is good? Or bad? Is good-or-bad really the right scale for describing design? How does a company manage design “quality” across a small, large, or distributed staff of designers? What is design “quality”?

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.

Many of the medical-technology companies I work for ask us to develop interfaces that use no text–icons only. It’s one of my least favorite conversation with a client. We sit in front of a very long list of product features; I envision a very simple menu system, organized to let the user easily find what he needs; the client says, “of course, we want to sell this in Europe and Asia, so everything has to be icon-driven. My heart sinks.

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. 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.

A tool that I end up using on nearly every project is the “Conversation Map.” I wrote a while ago about treating product interactions as conversations, and this is one of the simple-yet-key ways I use to make sure the interaction make sense and follows the conversational rules we all expect.

Here’s a simple example: what does the interaction between a vending machine and a customer look like? I put together a quick conversation map…