Product Behavior

Icons and instructional graphics are a language. Without knowing enough about the grammar to communicate properly, the message won’t get across. Part of the goal of the designer is to reduce the number of types of interactions the user must learn. To do this, the designer looks across the complete set of interactions in order to develop a small set that can handle all of them.

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”?

One simple thing I like doing when thinking about companies, products, and services, is the Modal Verb exercise. It’s interesting to do it by myself, and interesting to do with other designers and with clients. It’s easy–just fill in these blanks.

Often, it’s suggested by either my client or a colleague that we talk to “leading-edge” consumers instead of just average consumers. Except sometimes the suggestion is “extreme” consumers. Is there a difference between “leading-edge” and “extreme” consumers?

Exactly where a product falls on the “Love It / Solves It” axes depends on what it means for a particular consumer to “love” a particular product, and on what it means for that product so “solve” a consumer’s problem. Any change to the product (and the way it is marketed) may move the product in any direction.