Product Behavior

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.

Sometimes, a feature that may never be used is given the “Primary Feature” treatment. Doing this changes the consumer’s perception of the product, on the shelf or in use.

Here’s a tool that we use often both to analyze and plan consumer experience. I’ll talk about it here as a piece of a product design process, but we use it for service design, retail design, even to plan a business model.

It’s hard to believe that we still have to recommend to companies that they consider the consumer’s entire process of learning, deciding, buying. The new things that are changing the interaction between company and consumer–like the “social media” stuff that presenters at this conference talked about–aren’t changing the fundamental need to know the consumer.

A fair amount of the work I do involves the design of “user interface.” I don’t know who coined that term, but it’s interesting. I’m sure it was a software engineer, who divided his or her work into “writing the code that actually does stuff” and “writing the code that lets the user interface with the code that actually does stuff.” It’s a term with product-orientation–if we were consumer oriented, we’d call it the “product interface.”